A Dream of Winter
by Zenthisoror
Summary: Juugo's clan are coming down the mountain; Itachi's been sent back to Konoha by the Akatsuki to investigate the visitors; 16 year old Sasuke might not quite be in his right mind - the future of 3 years on that 13 year old Sasuke has been brought into is about to give him more questions than answers, and Naruto doesn't want to answer them, but is all really as it seems?
1. Unfortunate Lookalikes

**Disclaimer: The characters are the property of Masashi Kishimoto and the Naruto franchise.**

**Author's Note: Hello! Pleasure to meet you, this is Zen, and this is the first chapter of a brand new story - not a sequel to the Spring of the Plague, I'm afraid, even though there is a season in the title, and it will be a little bit different in style. The thing with Spring was that I put in pretty much everything I ever wanted to deal with in the Naruto plotline on the theme of revenge. I don't think I'm ever going to write much better than Chapter 18 onwards of the Spring, but I won't let that stop me! Hopefully, we only get better with practice.  
**

**This time, however, I'm going to be playing a game. It might get a little bit surreal, a little confusing at points, but is that really a surprise when 'dream' is in the title? **

**It started off from two ideas: a) I want a whole family of Juugos descending on Konoha b) 13 year old Sasuke meeting 16 year old Shippuuden Naruto.**

**Updates, sadly, are going to be slower than I would like and probably irregular. I'm writing my own fiction at the moment, and the main reason I dumped this out is because otherwise I could hardly sleep for voices in my head!**

**Anyway, without further ado, here starts off**** Dream of Winter - a Zenthisoror take on the time-travelling fiction. **

******Best, Zen :D**

* * *

The teahouse off the road to Konoha was well known for having a very patient matron.

She was patient because it paid to be patient. Every man with a wallet, a sweet tooth and a well-nurtured caffeine addiction was a worthy customer, but the road to Konoha seemed to take a perverse delight in sending her specimens that really put her renowned patience to the test.

She didn't mean _ninjas _per se. The ninjas were to be expected. You couldn't hope to start up business around Konoha without catering for ninjas, and, on the whole, they tended to be good customers anyway. They paid in cash - sometimes suspiciously stained cash, but cash nonetheless; came in small groups that kept to themselves and spoke with their heads down, if they spoke at all; and when they left it was without a fuss, leaving neat clean tables behind, as though they had never been sitting there at all. The matron fancied that was force of habit.

No, what the matron meant were the customers that made her want to shrivel and die and curl up in a tea jar until they had left without even realising just how much they were making her suffer, the customers that brought in and left behind _baggage_.

Let's say, for example, the customers who came to the shop dowsed head to toe in slime and shaking river water out of their ears; or the customers that liked to chat away whilst the smell of sweat and smoke rising from their clothes settled in the booth alongside them like an extra, especially hard to throw out, companion.

At the moment the matron was amending her list to include customers who, with a bright white smile and look of intense concentration, picked their noses with the tip of a kunai like they were on a hunt for buried treasure.

"Naruto! That's disgusting! Put it away," hissed Sakura, after the matron taking their orders had given Naruto a long, dark look and stalked off to the kitchen, muttering under her breath about 'patience' and 'manners' and 'baggage'.

"It must have been a very large piece of snot if you couldn't chip it out with a kunai."

Naruto stowed away the incriminating knife and scowled at Sai. "You guys are disgusting. I wasn't picking my nose. I was just trying to get at this really massive splinter that happened to be up my nose, that's all!"

"Naruto, you're not convincing anybody."

"Well, you both saw that pine tree sneak up on me earlier, right?"

"You mean, the moment you jumped face first into the side of tree?"

"It came out of nowhere! I swear it snuck up on me like a Kiri-nin, dammit. I got a whole faceful of tree shrapnel – "

Kakashi leaned against the wall of the booth and watched Naruto and Sakura bicker whilst Sai pulled out a new self-help book and started to read. Kakashi knew they were more tired than they were letting on. Aside from Naruto's mishap with the tree, Sakura's attempts to keep Naruto in line were becoming increasingly half-hearted, and Sai had been reading the same page of his book for the past three days without appearing to have got any further than halfway down.

It had been a long mission, if only a simple one. A lord from the Land of Iron had been staying in Konoha for a month on a diplomatic visit to the Land of Fire. Their job had been to escort him back to the borders of Iron and ensure he was received by correct officials at the checkpoint. There hadn't been any trouble, but three weeks of furtive glances over shoulders and ears twitching to every hard-edged hiss that could either be branches rasping together or a sheathed blade brushing against cloth, quite unsurprisingly took its toll on the psyche.

The important thing now was that it was all almost over. With sufficient caffeine and sugar top-up, Kakashi predicted that they would make it back to Konoha, hot water, clean beds and food that hadn't been created in a lab to contain all things good and great about food _apart from flavour_, well before sunset.

"She always gives us that dirty look when we come through here," Naruto groused, rolling the hand towel on the table into a snake and then unravelling it. "I reckon that lady has it in for ninjas. She's prejudiced, she is. Seriously prejudiced. Right, Sensei?"

A voice sounded out from above them. "One house special parfait, one anmitsu, one kuzukiri and green tea all around?"

Naruto looked up at the waiter and froze in his seat.

Dark eyes. Dark hair tied back in a neat sleek tail. A pale face with lines much too severe for its age.

Sakura made a small noise at the back of her throat like she had been strangled and hands jumped instinctively to weapons pouches.

The waiter didn't seem to notice. He continued to smile, set down a cup of tea in front of each stunned ninja, and deftly slid a towering green parfait onto the table for Naruto.

When he straightened, the waiter finally must have realised that something was amiss. His smile faded and, glancing about the table, his face took on a nervous waxy sheen. "I'm sorry. Is there a problem with the order?"

Naruto had turned almost as green as his parfait. Sakura and Sai were openly staring.

Kakashi coughed into his fist and cleared his throat. "Not at all, but would you mind answering a few questions for us?"

"Some questions? I'll certainly try," the waiter said obligingly. "But if it's anything about the local area, I'm afraid I won't be much help. I've only been here since Tuesday, you see."

"Ah! I thought you were new. Where are you from?"

"Kareha. Born and bred," said the waiter with a tinge of pride. "My father runs a pottery and usually I work there with him, but my mother runs this teahouse, and she did a number on her hip recently, so I'm here helping her out until that's all sorted."

"I see, so your mother's the matron. She's a very patient lady. Famous for it around here, actually."

Naruto snorted and mumbled something about prejudice behind his parfait.

The waiter laughed. "Well, she certainly tries, although I wish she could be half as patient with her son as she is with her customers." He eyed Kakashi warily and gripped the tea-tray tight. "Is that all for questions, sir?"

"Oh, yes." Kakashi nodded. "Sorry to keep you."

The young man dipped his head, pushed his ponytail over his shoulder, and all but fled back to the kitchen.

As soon as he had disappeared, Naruto looked to Kakashi and gasped, "That was Itachi!"

"No, Naruto," said Kakashi levelly. "Just a young man with the terrible misfortune of looking and sounding very much like Itachi, although coming from a civilian town like Kareha, it's doubtful that he himself knows of the resemblance."

"Looked very much like - !? Sensei, that guy was practically Itachi's clone!"

"I can assure you, Naruto, that that young man wouldn't even be able to manipulate chakra, let alone be Uchiha Itachi. I checked with the sharingan. He's no more a ninja than the teahouse matron herself. Now, calm down."

Naruto grumbled and, snatching up his spoon, stabbed it down into the parfait. "Bet you wouldn't have been so cool if you hadn't been able to check with your eye, Kakashi-sensei."

"You lose your bet then, Naruto," Kakashi said lightly, covering the breath he took to ease his heart-rate as an inhalation of the steam coming off his tea. "Plenty of ninjas are capable of distinguishing a threat from non-threat without having a party trick like I do, and, by now, you really ought to be capable of doing so as well."

Naruto scowled then slumped down in his seat and throw up his arms in defeat. "Okay! Fine! I admit it! I freaked out and stopped thinking when I thought we'd been caught out by Akatsuki's new crazy plan to take over the world with a bogus teahouse chain."

"Naruto stopped thinking?" said Sai blandly, turning a page of his book. "I hadn't even realised he had started thinking. Should I perhaps make a report of this?"

"But, it does make you wonder, doesn't it?" Sakura murmured, as Naruto gnashed his teeth at Sai, her gaze sliding to the booth beside the entrance, where the waiter was taking the orders of a man in a hooded cloak. "If Uchiha Itachi had grown up in a civilian town, he might have smiled and got nervous and scared just like the rest of us, and been just another normal human being."

"Nah, not that one." Naruto firmly shook his head. "Itachi would never have been normal. He could have been born a weasel in the forest or something and he still would have ended up Uber-King of the Mass Murdering Weasels."

"Quite simply, Sakura," Kakashi stepped in as the girl mouthed Naruto's words to herself as though echoing the sounds of a foreign language, "Uchiha Itachi is only the Uchiha Itachi we all know and love today precisely because of his superhuman abnormality. To make him ordinary would make him no longer Itachi."

Naruto threw the spoon into the bottom of his scraped out parfait glass with a flourish of triumph. "Yeah, that's exactly what I was saying. Thanks, Kakashi-sensei."

As Sakura opened her mouth to tell Naruto just how much she doubted that and maybe demonstrate with her fist the strength of her opinion, Sai closed his book (_How to Read the Air - Timing in Conversations and other Everyday Social Interactions_) with a snap. "Would now be a good moment to make the appropriate finger gesture that will catch the waiter's attention, so that we can ask for the bill?"

"It certainly would be, but," Kakashi pressed Sai's hand to the table as the boy made to flip up a single finger that was neither the first, the ring or the little one, "maybe, Sai, leave the asking to me."

They left the teahouse minutes later, arguing loudly and energetically as they stepped out into the cold, without taking a single notice of the hooded man in the booth beside the entrance.

The man wrapped his cloak tighter about him as the group passed by, relaxing his hold on his hood only when their voices had faded away from the door.

"Noisy lot, aren't they?" quipped the matron with a scowl, setting the cup of tea down onto the table a little harder than perhaps she had intended.

"They were certainly lively," agreed the man. He pushed his glasses up his nose and gave the matron a mild, pleasant, easy-going smile. "Do they come here often?"

"More often than I would like, and today they had the cheek of _interrogating_ my son as though he was some kind of criminal."

Kabuto, warming his hands on the cup of tea, raised his eyebrows and appeared concerned. "I'm sorry to hear that. Poor boy. That must have been difficult for him."

"Oh, no, it wasn't as bad as I've made it sound. It's simply that…" The matron trailed off. She blew out her cheeks and shook her head. "It's simply that so many of my ninja customers have been questioning and probing him since he's come to help me that I can't help but _worry_ for him. Some of the ninjas' reactions have been rather aggressive, to say the least, and none of them will tell us why they react in such a way. They always seem very embarrassed."

Kabuto was all wide-eyed sympathy. "It sounds as though he ought to leave here as soon as he possibly can. How long does he intend to stay?"

"Three months, possibly two, depending on how long it takes for my hip to sort itself out." She looked over her shoulder to where her son was wilting under the glares of another ninja team. "I pray that nothing will happen to him during that time."

"Indeed," Kabuto said warmly, nodding in agreement. "We can only pray."

* * *

As he made his way back to the kitchen, the young waiter froze. His head was already half-ducked under the hangings in the doorway. He slowly withdrew, straightened and looked back behind him.

His heartbeat throbbed in his ears, not quick, not drumming, but desperately loud, beating against his brain in an attempt to make him _notice_ something, something absolutely essential for his survival in the near future.

He scanned the booths of the shop. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end. His skin suddenly felt ill-fitting and uncomfortable, itchy like dirty robes.

_What? _He demanded of himself, as the chatter of the customers faded beneath the earnest beat in his chest and their faces seemed to blur together. _What am I supposed to see?_

But the waiter was a Kareha civilian potter and not a Konoha ninja, so when he felt the sensation of being watched, observed and measured for a part in some wicked scheme, he failed to recognise it.

The waiter shook his head, told himself it must have been the chill of a stray draught snapping through the room, and carried on into the kitchen with the parfait glasses balanced on his tray.

Kabuto set down his money on the table and left.

* * *

Orochimaru had a peculiar characteristic that only those who lived with the man knew about. Those who knew, however, paid special attention never to mention it to their master, because to point out that the great Orochimaru could be affected by something so trivial as _the weather_ was tantamount to climbing headfirst into Manda's jaws, body greased in butter to better slide down his throat.

Yes, Orochimaru the Snake Sannin was affected by the weather more so than the average human. Kabuto had noticed with no small amusement that on hotter days Orochimaru had a spring in his step, tended to eat better and was inclined to teach Sasuke harder and more complex jutsus that more often than not had an explosive quality to them.

On colder days it was very much the opposite. Orochimaru was sluggish (by his standards only. By all the usual ninja standards, he was still dangerously quick-witted) and pensive. He avoided his more difficult work, spent more time in bed, and, weighed down by thoughts of his decaying body and desperate quest for immortality, was generally keener to heckle and be needlessly cruel to his subordinates.

Sometimes Kabuto wondered what would happen if they took Orochimaru to the Land of Snow. Perhaps the man would slink off under a rock, curl up and hibernate. He was more snake than man these days after all.

But it was on such Cold Days, when Orochimaru was turning over slow and dark and bitter thoughts like he was churning a bucket of congealing blood and especially mindful of the _imperfection_ of his body, that Kabuto had to tread with particular care.

Orochimaru set aside the dinner that he had barely touched onto the bedside table. "You are quiet this evening, Kabuto. Is there something on your mind?"

Kabuto was replacing books from a pile onto shelf. He stopped and composed his face into the humble smile of a patient and loyal subordinate. "I was thinking about the Fushi Tensei, Orochimaru-sama."

"What a coincidence." Orochimaru's tongue flickered between his teeth to catch at the air. "The same thing happened to be on my mind as well, and what of it?"

"Are you planning on carrying out the ritual sometime soon, my lord?"

Orochimaru eyed Kabuto with a cold, yellow gaze that would have made lesser men twitch and squeak like mice.

"It will have to be done within the month," Orochimaru answered shortly. "This body will not hold up for much longer. It is rejecting me. I can feel it fighting to be rid of me even now as we speak." _Like a rat gnawing at boils upon its very own skin._ "Why do you ask?"

"Orochimaru-sama," began Kabuto with a bow, because it never hurt to dip his head when facing someone who, if the mood took him, would snap Kabuto's neck and dip his head _for _him, "you told me before that the Fushi Tensei is a battle of wills, in which one will, your will, overwhelms and devours the other. In the past, this has been so, except you have never have had to battle for your will to triumph – your chosen bodies all willingly offered their bodies to you.

"Uchiha Sasuke, however," Kabuto wrinkled his nose at the thought of the other apprentice lurking somewhere in the base, most likely in the training room, where the boy usually took off to at night, "I don't think he will let himself be overpowered so easily."

To Kabuto's surprise, Orochimaru agreed. "No, Sasuke will not, but I have known that for quite some time. Sasuke's loyalty to me is tenuous, if we could call such a thing loyalty. He is loyal to himself and his petty little blood quest, and I – I know that he sees me as little but a means to an end! The insolence of it all!" Orochimaru spat, glaring at his hands, but then he closed his eyes and chuckled with a hollow clicking sound, snapping his tongue against the back of his incisors. "Sasuke's allegiance to me is nothing more than a genjutsu that he will have me believe in until he gets what he wants, but how typical of an Uchiha, to be so proud!"

Kabuto listened in silence as Orochimaru seemed torn between admiration for Sasuke's pedigree Uchiha spirit and fury that the boy had never bowed and become his creature like Kimimaro had.

Orochimaru folded his hands together on top of the sheets and chuckled again. "But ironically, perhaps in his pursuit for vengeance we could say that Sasuke is unwaveringly loyal to his brother. He is following his Itachi's last wishes to the letter after all..."

"But Orochimaru-sama, that is precisely my point," Kabuto pressed him. "So long as Sasuke has Uchiha Itachi, and Itachi's death as his goal, he has a purpose and direction of his own, a life of his own, loyalties of his own – too many things to give up or entrust to you when you take over his mind. Everything is about _him_, _himself_ and his _own free will_. He will most certainly try to overpower you during the Fushi Tensei!"

"Kabuto," hissed Orochimaru with sudden menace, a white gleam in his eye, "since when did you have the nerve to suggest that I, Orochimaru, would lose in the Fushi Tensei to a sixteen year old Uchiha child?"

"Forgive me, Orochimaru-sama, it was not my intention to imply such a thing," Kabuto backtracked hastily, resisting the urge to shield himself behind the book he held in his hands. "I simply wondered how difficult you imagined the fight with Sasuke was going to be, and whether, if I found a way to, perhaps, tip the odds in your favour, you would be interested."

Candles in the alcoves wavered. Orochimaru's lips peeled back from his mouth in a wide, wide smile that stretched up to his ears. "We are ninjas, Kabuto. We sneak in the shadows and backstab and poison. It is in our natures to fight dishonourably, despite what the newer, softer ninja generations of today are saying. What is it that you suggest?"

"Sasuke-kun's will's strongest weapon and defence in the Fushi Tensei is his goal to kill Uchiha Itachi. All we have to do is create a temporary opening in his defence to allow your will, Orochimaru-sama, to get through, and in order to do that, we need him to, for a fraction of a second, to doubt and give up on his goal. In short - " Kabuto wiped his hands of dust from the shelves and bent to collect the tray bearing Orochimaru's unfinished meal. "- we need Sasuke to _temporarily _despair."

Orochimaru's eyes burned bright in the gloom. "You have found a way other than killing Uchiha Itachi himself?"

Kabuto smiled. "Sasuke-kun need only doubt for a second or less, however long it takes for your great mind, Orochimaru-sama, to invade an opening in his. A warm, fresh corpse that looks just enough like Itachi to shock him will be more than sufficient for the trick."

* * *

Four Weeks Later

* * *

_To the Hokage of Konoha,_

_Greetings from the Wild Gods Mountain. We hope that this letter finds you well in this unusually cold winter. I am writing on behalf of my clan, the Koujins, an old clan that perhaps you might have heard of._

_We recently received news that a young man displaying characteristics associated with our kekkei genkai was rescued from a research compound and taken in by Konohagakure. We are concerned as to the extent to which the secrets of our kekkei genkai have been uncovered and would like to send a delegation to visit Konoha, settle his affairs in the Land of Fire and bring him back to our village._

_A number of years ago one of our younger clansmen left our mountain in an act of voluntary exile, considering himself too dangerous even amongst the Wild Gods. From descriptions of his behaviour in captivity, we believe that you have taken in Koujin Juugo, said young clansman. He is sorely missed and we are hoping to reunite him with his remaining family members._

_As a clan, we are also aware that we have become very isolated from the affairs of the Land of Fire in the past century or so. We are hoping that our visit will be an opportunity to remedy this, and to announce to a new generation that we are ready to play an active role in lowlands society again._

_For these reasons, we will be sending a diplomatic delegation expected to arrive in Konoha on 12__th__ Mutsuki, consisting of our elders and a contingent of guards as befitting their status. We predict that we will be staying in Konoha for a month, or however long it takes to recover what has been found out about our kekkei genkai._

_I am sure that as the Hokage you appreciate our wish to keep our clan secrets to ourselves. That our kekkei genkai may have been stolen and twisted to suit another's malicious purposes is a great shame and dishonour to the Koujin clan._

_I will look forward to making your acquaintance on 12__th__, in Konoha. _

_Regards,_

_Koujin Tahei_

_On behalf of Koujin Hatsu, Tetsu and Tsukinowa – Koujin Elders._

* * *

In the Land of Fire there was a cave that did not exist.

It did not exist the same way that the great wooden statue inside it, all mildewed and grey and hidden in shadow, did not exist.

Likewise there was a man who did not exist, who held meetings that did not happen, and right at that moment, the shapes of his followers were not standing atop of the great wooden statue's fingers, as robed shadows flickering with twists of blue.

This meeting with the Akatsuki leader, therefore, did not take place, and nobody spoke.

Business as usual then, but let us hypothetically reconstruct just what one such non-existent meeting would have been like, had it actually occurred.

"There has been a development that concerns me," rang out a voice in the dark.

"Well, obviously, otherwise you wouldn't have called us together," grumbled another, before adding hurriedly, "Sorry, boss, no disrespect meant."

A third voice chimed in. "Is this about the clan from Wild Gods Mountain?"

"I heard that they've sent a delegation to Konoha. About…you know," the fourth voice suddenly trailed off, and eyes slid sideways to the man on the neighbouring finger. The man did not respond, but simply stared ahead into the dark with glowing red eyes.

"That members of the Koujin clan have come down from their Mountain should be a worry to us all," said the first voice briskly, taking the lead again. "The Koujin clan has not been seen in the Land of Fire for centuries. They keep to themselves, apparently for their own good, but the Wild Gods Mountain is named after the clan and if that's a reference to their potential power, we cannot underestimate them. I want to know everything about this clan – what their present state is, what their intentions are, what they can do, and whether we will be able to potentially use them for our cause."

A shadow snorted and flipped its hair out of its eyes. "You don't believe they're coming for a simple diplomatic mission then, do you?"

Eyes smiled and the voice continued. "I want one of you to be undercover in Konoha for the period of the Koujin clan's visit."

"Undercover? Like lying low and wearing disguises?" chattered one of the shadows excitedly.

"Sir," spoke up the shadow with the red eyes at last, his voice cutting through the buzz of voices in the cave. "Kisame and I are already stationed near Konoha. Considering that the delegation will arrive in a matter of days and we are pressed for time, it is only logical that one of us should go."

The silence prickled with ripples of suspicion and amused snorts.

"When you say either you or Kisame," a shadow gestured but his hand movement was lost in a blur of blue light, "you mean yourself, right?"

"Of the two of us it would be wiser to send me in," the red-eyed shadow agreed. "I have a history with Konoha, and that is only to my advantage. I will have them believe that I have left the Akatsuki and returned to the village. Come home at last, if you will."

Another shadow scoffed and leaned against his scythe. "Yeah, and Konoha will just open her gates and accept you in with open arms, no problem. They'll throw you straight into prison to make friends with the torturer."

"I will tell them that I left the Akatsuki because I was seriously ill and having difficulties carrying out my duties, so the leader tried to dispose of me, having no need for a broken tool," suggested the red-eyed shadow and the large figure with a sword on the finger beside him snorted. "If they continue to suspect me, I will say that Akatsuki sent me in to Konoha to investigate the Koujin delegation with the aim of recruitment, but that I am abandoning them to save my skin. Remaining with the organisation would prevent me from accessing medical care that I need to live, and if I stayed the leader would destroy me as soon as he found out about my condition. Besides, it will not hurt for Konoha to know that the Koujin clan is dangerous. As for prison, what prison do you imagine could ever contain me?"

"That may be, Itachi, but given recent events, are there perhaps other issues influencing your thoughts?" probed the first voice.

Red eyes glowed like hot beads of iron. "Concerning my mission to capture the Nine-tailed Jinchuuriki, my posting in Konoha itself will also serve as an advantage. The Nine-tailed Jinchuuriki is currently occupied with a matter within Konoha, and I hear that he won't be taking missions outside of the village for the next three months. If I get within the walls, I will be closer to our target and be more likely to spot an opportunity for capturing him."

"I was actually asking about your younger brother," the first voice said with amusement and the red-eyed shadow went grimly quiet. "I hear he's not quite been his usual self for the past three weeks, since being found in Orochimaru's lair by his old teammates. No sign of Orochimaru for the past three weeks either. All rather mysterious, wouldn't you say?""

The shadow flickered blue and red. "He was weak and foolish and paid the price. I am ashamed to have called him my brother."

"As for you being sick enough that the Akatsuki will no longer have any need of you, unless you receive urgent hospital treatment," the first voice rolled on smoothly and slowly, "how do you plan on creating that particular disguise?"

"There is no better disguise than no disguise at all, sir."

After a minute of stunned silence, the leader of the Akatsuki straightened from his sitting position on the great wooden statue. "Then I will expect a raven every four days with updates on your progress, Itachi. Kisame will remain stationed near Konoha to support you in case of emergency."

"Understood, sir."

The large shadow with a sword grunted. "Support seems to be my middle name these days."

* * *

" – if this works, I mean I tried the finger-snap thing, and it still – I mean – wait, wait a moment – "

In the dark space of unconsciousness, the sudden echo of an unfamiliar voice stirred up a cloudy swirl of alarm.

"- definitely something –"

Was that a torch being shined into his face? A torch? Really?

He could feel soft warmth on his face, or was that the soft warmth _of _his face? Possibly, but the warmth of the torchlight was soon coupled with the crunch of dust being pressed down under feet, or perhaps knees, and breathing that he could not only hear, but feel lightly on his forehead…

Alright, whoever it was, they were much too close for comfort.

"Ouch! Damn you, bastard! What was that for?" A pause and the light shining through Sasuke's eyelids – _yes, eyelids, he was aware of eyelids now, that was good, it meant he had eyes_ – got yellower, brighter. "I don't believe it. He isn't even fully conscious and he still socks me on the jaw."

Well, it served him right, for getting so close, but Sasuke's brain was finally catching up with what was going on around him and it was raising some very disturbing flags.

Number one, there was somebody with a vaguely familiar, but verging on unfamiliar, voice sitting in very close proximity to him and talking if not to air then somebody else, suggesting not one, but multiple unfamiliar people in the room, possibly surrounding him.

Number two, as Unfamiliar-Possibly-Familiar had spoken his voice had echoed in a way that suggested a high ceiling and hard walls, which was very distinctly not how voices sounded in Sasuke's flat. Not to mention that the gritty floor pressing into his shins was cold and likely stone.

Oh, and number three, he seemed to be slumped at the base of a wall – it could have been worse, he could have been lying down, but all the same, backed up against a wall was not a good starting point for fighting his way out.

Because surrounded by strange people in a strange place, what other possible course of action was he going to take?

"Goddamit!" Cloth stretched and blades in a weapons pouch clinked, as Unfamiliar-Possibily-Familiar stood up and yelled. Sasuke froze and listened as the voice continued. "He did something to him! This is even worse than how he was before!"

"Naruto, please calm down." There was company after all. A girl. Familiar? Unfamiliar?

Wait, who was he kidding? He was a ninja. If there was even a fraction of a reason to suspect or doubt, then he shouldn't be wasting his time considering otherwise.

Settled then. Both present members of company were Sufficiently Unfamiliar to be Cause for Concern.

"I knew it. I knew he was just going to…The next time we see him, I'm going to peel his face off using those face-lines as my guidelines." Footsteps crunched on dust again. He was close. He was standing right over Sasuke. Knee joints creaked, then the – man? - was squatting in front of him.

The torch-light swung into his face again. "Last chance, bastard, give us a sign, or – "

Sasuke opened his eyes at the same time as his fist flew forward. His punch collided with bone - the chin of Sufficiently-Unfamiliar-Number-One – a blond teenaged boy, older and bigger than Sasuke, likely a bruiser, not a speedster - and the blond toppled backwards with a squawk, flailing and dropping the torch.

Why had the guy been carrying a torch anyway? The room was lit well enough to be able to see without one, but now wasn't the time to question the sense of his captors. The girl had made a move. He had seen a pink blur out of the corner of his eye.

A blond with a loud mouth and a partner-in-crime pink-haired female? Did somebody think they were being _funny?_

Sasuke planted one foot on ground, readied to kick off and twist for a feinting high blow, when a blond clone grabbed both of his ankles and slammed him flat on the ground.

His chin smacked stone and the breath was knocked out of him. He thought he had heard his knees crack, but damn, how had he even let the clone catch him? He must have seriously miscalculated his leg reach.

As Sasuke lay there, winded and muscles aching, hands seized his shoulders with a surprising gentleness and turned him over - the girl, with the short pink hair, who if he hadn't known better he might have thought was an older sister of Sakura's. The similarities were worryingly uncanny.

Speaking of uncanny similarities, the blond clone standing over Sasuke with its arms akimbo and a huge grin plastered across its face as it regarded its handiwork…

He blinked up into the light and stared. Whiskers, scars, birth-marks – whatever they were – just before the clone had waggled its fingers and popped out of existence, he had seen lines on the young man's face, plain as day.

Three straight lines on each cheek.

He tried to swallow but his mouth was too dry and his breathing was becoming harsher and louder and more irregular by the minute.

Either Sasuke had been kidnapped by some sick freaks who liked to terrorise him dressed up as his (_friends_) teammates, or Naruto and Sakura had teamed up (_was the world about to end and he, Sasuke, the only one left in the dark?_) for a prank – an elaborate prank where they had henge-d to make themselves look older for gods knew why - and Sasuke had just been taken down by a kunoichi who was doing alright but could certainly do better, and the loser of the century who thought orange was stealthy and tactics a kind of mint.

That was ridiculous, of course, and Sasuke quickly dismissed the idea, but then that would leave him with only the first incredibly disturbing scenario, or the third and worst scenario of all.

_A genjutsu, _whispered a voice, from that treacherous part of his mind that liked to torment him, and remind him with barbed, bitter prods that he was weak, small and foolish. _And a powerful genjutsu at that_.

Genjutsu or freaks, either way, the situation was looking bad, although it could be worse, he thought with a sudden swoop of dread - the others might have been captured as well and held somewhere separately, but why? Why was this happening to them?

The blond teenager with the face marks, who looked strikingly similar to Naruto, came to squat alongside the girl who looked like Sakura. The Naruto-lookalike was rubbing at a bruise that was spreading wide and mottled like an ink stain across his chin. Sasuke noted it with with a warm curl of satisfaction.

"Man, Sasuke," the Naruto-lookalike said, in that unfamiliar-familiar voice, "as much as I know you hate me, what was that? That was, like, nought to Assigned-Personal-Punch-Bag-for-my-Uchiha-Angst in two seconds!"

He even sounded like him. Sasuke clenched his hands into white-knuckled fists, felt nails bite. He had to keep a grip on himself, either that or lose his grip on reality entirely and that was too terrifying a thought to bear.

"Who are you, and why do you look like Naruto and Sakura?" he demanded. "And why am I here?"

To Sasuke's astonishment, the Naruto-lookalike and Sakura-lookalike gasped, and exchanged a look that could almost have been called joy. Sakura-lookalike's eyes _glistened._ Sasuke had to hand it to these imposters - their theatrics weren't half-bad. The Naruto-lookalike had broken into a smile that could have advertised sunbeams.

"It worked. I don't believe it…it actually…Oi, Sasuke, how old are you?"

No way in Hell did he want to answer their questions if they weren't answering his, but if this was the only way to make them speak, and eventually slip and give him something to work with, then so be it. "I'm thirteen. Why?"

"And what's happening tomorrow?" continued the Naruto-lookalike excitedly.

There was no danger about telling them about the Chuunin Exams. Every hidden village and their surrounding civilian towns knew the dates anyway.

"It's the first day of the Chuunin Exams," Sasuke answered warily, trying to read his captors faces for their intentions, but they were far too good. All he saw was astonished near-tearful happiness and not a flicker of anything sinister in the slightest.

"And the last thing you remember is?" prompted the Naruto-lookalike.

"Going to sleep," Sasuke said flatly, wondering if such a boring truth would finally crack these two nuts open and get their ugly cores out on display, but apparently all it seemed to do was make the Naruto-lookalike happier than before.

The Sakura-lookalike helped Sasuke get up from the floor. Not that he needed help. He just felt sore and stiff as though he hadn't used those particular muscles like that in a while, which was odd because he had been stretching and training for much of the previous day. "What is going on?"

The Naruto-lookalike sighed and clapped his left hand on Sasuke's shoulder. Sasuke glowered and was about to shrug it off when the lookalike began to talk.

"Sasuke," the lookalike said, before screwing up his face in a look of concentration that was _so Naruto _Sasuke wanted to punch him (if he hadn't been trying not to provoke the enemy more than he potentially already had done), "don't freak or anything but you – "

"Naruto," said the Sakura-lookalike with a warning growl edging her voice, and Sasuke blinked and stared. They were even using his teammates' names as codenames now? This was going beyond sick. He squirmed under the Naruto-lookalike's grip on his shoulder, but the lookalike took no notice.

"You're kind of in the future," the lookalike finished. Somewhat lamely, as far as Sasuke was concerned.

Whoever hired these guys, he definitely needed to demand a refund.

Sasuke raised an eyebrow. "Do you want to try that again?"

"No, really, you are," the Naruto-lookalike insisted, and the Sakura-lookalike nodded stiffly in agreement. "Sasuke, you're three years in the future. I'm Naruto, the real and one and only, and that's the real Sakura - we're both sixteen. You didn't recognise us straight off, did you?" He grinned at Sasuke's stupefied silence. "Guess we all got a lot better looking over the past three years, except Sakura-chan, of course, who's always been beautiful – oh, and exempting you as well. That sour depressed demon-of-vengeance face of yours just stuck, you see. Puberty was all a bit of a tragedy for you. Honestly, we don't know what happened, but I guess the moral of that story is…you shouldn't have looked so miserable all the time."

Sasuke narrowed his eyes at the self-proclaimed Naruto and Sakura in front of him. The balance was beginning to tilt from freaks involving Sasuke in some sick mind game towards being held captive in a genjutsu, which was all the worse for still being a sick mind game except potentially limitless in its horror.

Wasn't there a way of dispelling a genjutsu? He knew there was a way. Of course there was a way. It was simple. It was elegant. He…Come to think of it, there were several ways of dispelling a genjutsu, so why couldn't he remember any of the methods now?

_Think, Sasuke, think_. He pushed himself. He had to remember something.

But all he could find in his head was gaping emptiness.

Nothing.

A cold band of fear tightened about his chest.

'Naruto' was talking again. "You're probably thinking that you're in a genjutsu of some kind."

"Quit screwing around. I _know_ this a genjutsu," Sasuke snapped and he hated the tremor that shook his voice. "You've made it so that I don't even remember how to break out from one anymore. What have you done to me?"

"We haven't done anything to you, Sasuke-kun," 'Sakura' said quickly - _perhaps a little too quickly?_

"Hey, Sasuke, relax. The memory blanks? Yeah, he mentioned that might happen…." 'Naruto' trailed off uncertainly then snapped his fingers as he…_recalled something? Made up something?_ Sasuke couldn't decide. "It's an effect of the time-travelling, and, yeah, you've probably forgotten some other stuff as well, but don't worry too much about it. It'll all come back to you when you go back to your own time."

Sasuke stared at the supposed 'sixteen year old Naruto'. "You're still maintaining this time-travel story?"

"Sure I am," 'Naruto' said with a kind of glee that was artfully straddling the borderline of playful and wicked. "But I know what you're like, and I know that you're probably not going to believe us for ages and ages and ages, but until you do, bastard," he spread his arms wide and gestured around the stone room – the _cellar? basement? well?_ - "welcome to your three years on – a great future where I'm Hokage-in-Training, going out with Sakura, smoking hot when you're not, and people give me free ramen whenever I go out of my house, because I'm just that popular."

'Sakura' smiled sweetly up at 'Naruto' and cracked her knuckles.

"On second thoughts, I take all that back. That was my epic dream from Monday night, and none of that was true, but, welcome to the future anyway."

* * *

**Welcome to the future!**

**Review to let me know if you want to know what happens next,if there was anything at all you found interesting, or even if you're confused. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised.**

**********16 year old Sasuke's not quite himself, Juugo's mysterious relatives are on their way, Itachi's going to Konoha to work out what the Koujins want and 13 year old Sasuke's been brought into the future. Why? How? It's all going to go pear-shaped from here.**

**Thanks for reading. Zen :D**


	2. Idiots Watching Over Us

**Disclaimer: The characters are the property of Masashi Kishimoto and the Naruto franchise.**

**Author's Note: We're back a wee bit sooner than expected. Hello again! And this is the part where I salute everybody who read the first chapter, favourited, followed and left such lovely reviews. Ser Serendipity, kasinka613, Just-A-Dude and Rosebunse, thank you all so much. It's lovely to hear you speculate what you think is going on and being so encouraging. **

**I'm here with a second chapter and more strange goings on in Konoha. I said this story would be a little bit odd, a little be surreal. Anyhow, with this chapter, the story title ought to make sense, you get a first glimpse of our Koujins, and we've laid down all the stepping stones for carrying on. Yay! And Sai...oh, just to clarify, I like Sai. I really do. I just suspect that thirteen year old Sasuke wouldn't really take to him so well.**

**So without further ado, I hope you enjoy Chapter 2. Best, Zen :D**

* * *

The second stage of the Curse Seal was dangerous.

That much was obvious from the very first transformation, when new bones had grated into place against Sasuke's shoulders and his back had strained to take the weight of his wings.

The Sound Ninjas in Konoha had told him that if he lost control the form could consume him, and when he let the Curse Seal's murky power sit in his veins that threat always felt very real.

Every time Sasuke accessed that form it was though he was opening a door, to a place that was dark and filled with whistling shadows, and inviting something inside him – something that sometimes whispered, sometimes purred, sometimes shrieked to be let through. It scrabbled with yellowy claws and bit at the bolts with glistening fangs, and it was always there.

So Sasuke trained because that's what he always did when there was an enemy to overcome. He trained to endure its beating on the doors, and then he trained some more, so that when he let the thing in, he could keep a hold on its blue grey mane and throw it back into the hissing dark where it came from.

Sasuke, sitting cross-legged in the dark of the training room, sometimes used a different analogy.

He thought of a tightrope stretched across a great black pit.

There were deep blue skies above and a living darkness below that roared shadows and screamed ghosts. The pit yawned power, blasted it up from its depths, at times as a wind colder and sharper than a frozen razor.

He was the tightrope walker, learning to balance against the dark and control his balance perfectly, even when the pit screeched to shake him off and the burning wind tried to claw him down from the thin white rope.

The rope was a focus. It was something to grip onto as his hair bristled past his shoulders and the wings stretched from his back and his lips turned black and blue like they had been bitten at by frost.

A cynical voice (that he had never been able to silence) noted that by training his body to cope with the second stage of the Curse Seal, Sasuke had been trying to train himself to stay sane. Another, the cynical voice's even more cynical mentor, would then note that Sasuke had been 'trying', and then say no more.

Practising his control of the Curse Mark's second stage was best done somewhere quiet and with as little disturbance as possible. The exercises he carried out to work with it were quiet too. Sometimes he would meditate in a training room. Mostly he focused on stretching those muscles he would never have a chance of stretching otherwise.

Those wings, for example - those ugly, fleshy, knobbly-knuckled wings. They had been ungainly and cumbersome to start with, but gradually as he stretched them they had strengthened and become better able to support his weight.

He stretched one now, keeping his focus (think of the rope), unfurled his left wing and listened to the skin creak like a canvas sail. Bones aligned and clicked against each other. Muscles pulled and tensed. He held the stretch for eight quiet beats, and then began to do the same for the right.

It was at this moment, when Sasuke was precariously balancing on that mental tightrope, between perfect mastery of the second stage of the Curse Seal and being consumed by it, relishing in its power but also doggedly keeping his head above it, that the door to the training room was flung open and a figure all but threw himself inside, closely chased by another.

The chaser was Kabuto, rearing over the first figure with chakra scalpels gleaming. The one that had slammed headfirst through the door wore robes with a pattern of clouds, and as he whirled to face the doorway, long dark hair whipping about his head, the white light threw up lines on either side of his nose...

A sizzling and a wet tearing.

A sharp cry. A whoop of air escaping an open throat.

Then a body was falling and a head was flying off shoulders. Blood was on the floor and running over Kabuto's hands, and the head, spinning through the air, smacked face first into great palm of Sasuke's right wing before bouncing into his arms.

From behind Kabuto came the sound of a million chattering scales, the dry scraping of a thousand snake bodies coiling about each other, and, over and above these sounds, raspy breaths being sucked up by a split-jawed mouth with a violet tongue.

Sasuke looked at the head in his arms.

Sasuke stopped looking at the rope beneath his feet.

He was no longer focusing on keeping his balance. He was focusing on the head in his hands that was warm, real, and still gushing heat over Sasuke's clothes.

_Him._

That flash of a thought was a scream in his ears, and unleashed a barrage of questions and doubts that whirled through his mind, smacking, flapping and beating him down...

So when Orochimaru dived towards him with jaws wide, ready to trap him in a cage of fangs…

…Sasuke fell from the tightrope.

…He dropped into the pit.

And the pit howled and bared its teeth.

* * *

"Okay." Sasuke took a deep breath to steady his breathing. He looked this sixteen year old Naruto in the eye. "Let's say I am in the future, how did I get here?"

"Well, I don't know. You tell us maybe?"

Sasuke narrowed his eyes. "Weren't you the one shouting, 'It worked!' when I woke up?"

"I was talking about the stuff me and Sakura were doing to try and get you to wake up," said Naruto easily. He crossed his arms. "Why would either of us do a time-travel jutsu to bring you into the future anyway? If we did, wouldn't you think we'd have picked somebody else who was actually cool and awesome when they were thirteen, like me, or me?"

Sasuke gave Naruto a long, hard look that rated his level of 'awesome' somewhere around the fishcake that was the basis of his name.

Naruto sighed. "Maybe you tried out some crazy-stupid jutsu you dug up from a secret library from your old house before going to sleep?"

A vein in Sasuke's temple twitched. "No."

"Okay, but you can't say that for sure. Maybe you've just forgotten what happened. Maybe this is your second memory blank."

"Huh. Well, isn't that convenient?"

Sasuke lifted his eyes to look about the room. It was walled with stone, had a high domed ceiling and a single heavy door set with a grill to one side. At the top of the dome was circular window beyond which clouds, the grey of faded photographs, floated. The room was airy and dry, if a little cold. "Where am I?"

"Er…did you ever hear about that place on the other side of Konoha prison? Kind of a sanctuary?" Sasuke didn't think he had. "It's the place where they keep animals and things that have gone weird from being around ninjas. Like, there's this pig that's digested an explosive tag, and now it goes around farting fire, so they're keeping it around for studying, and then there's a sort of demon rat on the floor below – "

"Stop right there." Sasuke closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Why am I in a zoo for freak animals?"

"Well, we weren't sure if you really were, you know…_you,_" Naruto explained with a vague wave of his hands that outlined something mushroom-like with a massive head and a stick thin body. "You might have been some crazy alien bat-winged thing from another dimension or something, pretending to look like you. And you did appear in this big flash of blue light."

"I…did?"

"Yeah," Naruto was getting into his stride, and he rushed on without pausing for breath, "in the middle of our old training grounds. Right, Sakura-chan? She spotted you first, by the way!"

Sakura closed her eyes. "Please believe us, Sasuke-kun. It'd make things a lot easier for everybody if you did."

Sure it would, including easier to kill him, or take his eyes, or whatever it was they wanted do with him.

He slipped into a thoughtful silence, which Naruto broke a moment later. "Cheer up, bastard, it's not as though everything in this place is scary. I think there's whole room of cats stuck in genjutsus, and Ino says that one of her uncles is here. He got drunk and tried to possess a budgie or something. Oh yeah! I should probably be warning you about those weights."

"What weights?"

Sasuke followed Naruto's gaze to his feet and found white cloth tags wrapped around his ankles. He gave his feet an experimental shake, but the tags didn't feel any heavier than the bandages wound along his arms.

"Now, the next thing I'm going to say sounds pretty creepy even in my head, but don't worry. You've just got to trust me and Sakura on this," Naruto began in a way that rang a thousand alarm bells and switched on a thousand red lights. "Sasuke, you're not a prisoner, or anything like a prisoner, or a freak zoo animal, but…er…you're not going to be leaving this room...for a bit...but only for a little bit! Maybe a couple of days. We're working on it."

"What!?"

"Those are the Hokage's orders, Sasuke-kun!" Sakura cut in quickly. "She…she says that you're not to be let out of this room until…until she's worked out what's going on, and how to send you back into the past."

Sasuke found himself staring at her hands. They were balled tight into trembling, determined fists.

"She doesn't want you to see future Konoha, you see." Sakura swallowed thickly and carried on. "That's the other reason why you're here. In this room. Because there's only the one window and the only thing you can see from it is the sky. She wants to make sure you see as little of the future as possible, so that when you go back to your own time you don't try to change the past to stop things happening as they did and destroy this future. That's…that's why you can't leave this room. Yet."

Before Sasuke could press her for questions, Naruto shouted: "Can you see this line?"

Naruto was standing around three metres from the door. He was pointing a finger at something by his feet in front of him.

A thin red line was etched into the floor, shaping a hemisphere about the doorway. There was also a line on the walls about eight feet off the ground all around the room. Sasuke nodded and waited for Naruto to go on, which never needed much encouragement before.

"If you try to step over this line those cloth tags will get ridiculously, ridiculously heavy, and they'll stop you moving," said Naruto as way of explanation, gesturing emphatically at the line again, "so when they start weighing you down, that's your cue to back off, otherwise…don't know…you might break your ankles if you try to jump over it, so…just don't try anything dramatic, okay?"

Sakura suddenly stood up and went to Naruto's side. Sasuke didn't see her face, but her shoulders were bunched and knotted like a twisted cloth wrung dry. She whispered something in Naruto's ear, which made the boy grimace, but he nodded, and she left the room.

Sasuke should have been tense and taut as a spool of ninja wire. He should have stolen a kunai off Sakura as she walked past him and tried to cut off these strange weight tags, which for all of Naruto's apparent concern were just a more humane form of shackles. He should've stopped talking and started planning. Gods, there were so many actions he could have taken, but nothing seemed completely right or seemed to fit. Jigsaw pieces to fit the puzzle failed to fall into place.

He shook his head furiously. What was wrong with him? He had to think, but it was like he was looking at a problem through a goddam kaleidoscope!

"Oi, bastard."

Naruto had come back to stand in front of him. Sasuke started and looked up from where he was still sitting on the floor. His knees smarted from where they'd hit the stone.

"What?"

Naruto stretched himself to his full height, and looked down his nose. "I'm tall, aren't I?"

Oh, Sasuke knew where this was going. "Shut up."

"When you were standing up, and _failing_ to kick mine and Sakura's butts for a bit," Naruto pushed on, looking unhelpfully gleeful as Sasuke bristled in his shadow, "did I look about two heads taller than you, or four?"

Sasuke glowered at the older, taller, bigger Naruto and wondered if those two extra heads of height justified pounding the moron's head in three times over.

Then Sasuke snorted. "I get it."

Naruto frowned. "Get what?"

"I'm taller than you when I'm sixteen, aren't I?"

Sasuke hoped he would get some satisfaction seeing that infuriating smirk wiped off Naruto's face. It didn't happen. Naruto looked irritated only for a fraction of a second as his brain (or at least the percentage of it that wasn't dedicated to the body's basic functions or noodles) fought for a suitably good comeback, before bursting out laughing.

Naruto smiled even wider than before. This time with eighty-percent added _nostalgia. _Something about that smile made Sasuke feel less like a time-traveller and more like a man brought back from the dead.

All of a sudden, Sasuke realised that he was being rather enthusiastically patted (pounded, slapped, bounced?) on the top of his head. Sasuke was too stunned to move, because he was being _goddam bloody patronised by NARUTO_.

"Look, bastard, I'm guessing this is all pretty hard for you, but, just…just don't worry, okay. Me and Sakura, we've got everything covered. Don't worry. We'll get things back to normal. You can leave it to the grown-ups."

"Oh, that really fills me with _such_ confidence!" Sasuke slapped Naruto's hand away.

"Naruto? Are you still in there?"

Sasuke knew that voice. He looked up. "Kakashi!"

Kakashi started and stopped in the doorway.

A heartbeat later he carried on into the room with his usual easy swinging strides, but that small hesitation had already stoked Sasuke's suspicions again. The Kakashi he knew walked in wherever and whenever he wanted. He always appeared at exactly the moment he wanted to appear and in exactly the places where he was _meant _to be.

It wasn't like Kakashi to hesitate on the threshold and start like he had seen an old ghost.

Then again, the thirteen year old Sasuke probably did qualify as a ghost – a ghost from Kakashi's past, but Sasuke wasn't prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt quite yet.

He couldn't help noticing that Kakashi came to a stop when his feet were toeing the red line in the floor.

Kakashi smiled with his eye. "Ah! So you recognised me!"

He hadn't changed much in three years – still the same hair, the same lazy eye and the same old pages of a dubious book tucked into his back-pocket.

"Why wouldn't I recognise you?"

"Well, with all the trouble and stress you three keep insisting on putting me through I would have thought I'd have gained some grey hairs in the past three years." Kakashi ran a hand over his head before frowning. "Oh wait, my hair is grey anyway. Haha."

Sakura stood in the doorway behind Kakashi. She must have whispered to Naruto that she would be going to fetch their teacher. She said, "Naruto was just filling Sasuke in on how he arrived here from the past, Kakashi-sensei. Right, Naruto?"

Naruto nodded. "You remember, Sensei? That big blue flash of light in our old training grounds?"

Kakashi blinked slowly. "Oh yes. Sorry. I see. Yes, that was quite something wasn't it? Sakura was shouting, and you were screaming and flapping about like a chicken with its backside on fire…"

"I was not!" Naruto objected.

"What about me?" Sasuke asked, intrigued despite himself. "Where was I?"

"Hospital," said Kakashi and Sakura together, at the same time Naruto said, "At home."

There was a moment of awkward silence and then Naruto turned to look furiously round at the other two. "What?"

Sakura sighed. "Naruto, you're such an idiot sometimes it actually hurts…"

"The medics ran some tests just before Sasuke was scheduled to be released and found some developments they hadn't predicted," Kakashi told Naruto, and Sasuke listened with a sudden stirring of dread. "They want to keep him under watch for the next few weeks and make sure his condition doesn't worsen. Sorry, Naruto, we should have told you earlier."

"Yeah, you should have."

"Is there something wrong with me?"

Naruto and Sakura both flinched at Sasuke's question.

Kakashi waved his hands in what he probably imagined was a soothing gesture, and said, "No, no, Sasuke, not at all. Nothing too serious."

"But, I'm in hospital?"

"You went away on a long solo mission and came back with a parasitic disease that's proving a bit difficult to get rid of, that's all."

"That's _all_?"

"Don't worry. Your future is still alive, stubborn and causing all sorts of worries and troubles for the rest of us."

A parasitic disease? The very idea of something invading Sasuke's body and twisting it into some kind of den for it own purposes made his skin crawl.

"Anyway, Naruto, Sakura – I want a word with the two of you about Hospital-Sasuke, so let's give this one some breathing space for a couple of hours," Kakashi said brightly, seizing Naruto and Sakura by the backs of their necks as he smiled down at Sasuke. "Sasuke, perhaps try and get some sleep. Time-travelling sounds very draining. I'm sure you could do with some. I could certainly do with some."

He could also do with a stiff drink, but Kakashi didn't mention that.

Sasuke was reluctant to see them go. He still hadn't had all the answers he wanted, and the more these three talked the more questions he wanted to ask, but for now, perhaps it wasn't so bad to have time to collect his thoughts and make sense of what little he had gleaned.

"Fine. But I'll ask more questions later."

"Good. Then this will be the perfect opportunity for us to prepare the appropriate answers." Kakashi turned away and half-dragged Naruto and Sakura along with him.

"Wait! Oi, wait! Kakashi-sensei! Come on, he's just woken up. We can't just leave him already – "Naruto was protesting as the door closed behind them.

The bolts scraped shut, and the future Naruto, Sakura and Kakashi were gone.

* * *

Once they were down the stairs at the end of the corridor, Kakashi stopped, let go of Naruto and Sakura's collars and spun them round to face him.

"Naruto, Sakura. I hope you two are proud of yourselves."

Sakura at least had the good grace to look guilty. Naruto, however, did not seem even remotely apologetic. "Kakashi-sensei, what else were we supposed to do? I mean, I know we were all hoping it would work, but none of us actually seriously thought it would! I had to improvise!"

"I know, Naruto, I know." Kakashi sighed and hung his head. He didn't know whether he wanted to strangle the boy, or praise him for what could be called a stroke genius. "But now we have to deal with the consequences, and you've potentially made things a lot more difficult for us than they otherwise would have been - not that they weren't difficult enough already. Sakura," he looked past Naruto to where Sakura was quietly staring down at her feet, "well done for coming to find me, and getting me up to speed with the situation so quickly."

"But that was him, Kakashi-sensei!" Naruto spluttered, following on his tail. "I talked to him. That was him. That really felt like the old bastard himself – from three years ago, before he got messed up by that Snake Git, and his brother. It's like he's really come back! The Sasuke we all knew! He's - "

"No, Naruto," said Kakashi firmly. "He hasn't come back. When we've found out everything that needs to be done to help him, thirteen-year old Sasuke will have to go back to where he came from. The problems of the present won't go away just because you're preoccupied by the past."

They had come to an office. It was usually the office of the sanctuary warden, but today the warden had taken the afternoon off and handed the keys to somebody else.

The door was opened by an ANBU officer with a plain white mask – plain and blank, round like the moon. Kakashi couldn't see who was behind those eye-holes and he didn't feel he wanted to. The officer was silent as it stepped aside to let them through.

"That was quicker than expected," said the man seated in the office. "Was there a problem?"

"None," Kakashi replied, and was about to continue when Naruto rushed forward, ducking round Kakashi in the doorway, and stormed up to the desk at which the man was sitting.

The ANBU officers positioned around the room tensed and put hands to hilts, but Naruto had no intention of launching an attack. He stopped and folded his arms, considered the man who had, until five days ago, not only been one of Naruto's worst enemies but a face in his worst and most overwhelming of nightmares.

"It worked," Naruto said stiffly. "Just like you said, Uchiha Itachi."

The corners of Itachi's lips twitched. He seemed amused, but he might just as easily have been disappointed, or annoyed. It was hard to tell with this man. "That is good to hear."

Kakashi narrowed his eyes. For a moment, he thought he had seen a ghost of emotion fly across Itachi's face – a shadow of disgust. No, it was deeper and uglier than that. It was _self_-disgust.

Itachi looked past Naruto at Kakashi."I have been ordered from now on to stay away from my brother upstairs."

"Well, that does seem sensible. At that age, mentioning your name was something like stamping on an exploding tag. Dare I ask whose orders?"

"Konoha's orders," replied Itachi, "and since that is the way of things, I will have to leave Sasuke in your care."

"You can leave him with us alright," Naruto lowered his voice, his eyes flashed, "and you can count on us to do a better job protecting him than you ever did as a brother!"

Itachi raised his eyebrows and snorted, and once again it was an absolute mystery to anybody what was going through his mind. Was he laughing at Naruto, or laughing at himself? Was he, in fact, even laughing at all? Had he even snorted? It had been that imperceptible.

The ANBU officer with the round white mask suddenly tapped his left wrist with a finger. Itachi saw the signal, and rose to his feet. He had been conveyed by the cluster of ANBU officers almost to the door before Itachi spoke up again.

"If there are any problems or developments concerning the state of my brother, make sure that I know."

* * *

A strange face had appeared in the grill of the door.

The young man was pale with glossy black hair, but despite those features he was not an Uchiha. That much Sasuke could tell just from his eyes. There was no spirit, no inborn sense of a divine right to burn all enemies and strive ever upwards for power. His expression was bland and plain, and a touch sour. A bit like yoghurt, Sasuke thought dryly.

Sasuke gave Yoghurt-face his best bemused stare. "What do you want?"

"Do you know who I am?"

"No."

Yoghurt-face looked down, as though checking a guide of some kind, which was exactly what he was doing judging by the sound of turning pages. "Then isn't the usual question to ask in introductions, 'Who are you?', or one of its many other abusive variants?"

This person was an idiot, Sasuke decided, as he heard another page turn. He might even be a moron beyond the level of Naruto, which he had thought was nigh impossible.

Then again, he was forced to remind himself, time-travel was supposed to be impossible as well.

"I think I am a friend of your team-mates," Yoghurt-face continued.

Sasuke raised an eyebrow. "You think?"

"Yes. After all, I have nicknames for them and they let me use them, and they help me learn when to use them and when not to use them," Yoghurt-face said as way of explanation. "That level of tolerance suggests a degree of trust close to friendship, so…yes. I like to think I am their friend. But you, on the other hand, Uchiha Sasuke," a smile moulded itself onto that blank white face, "we are not friends."

Glad to hear it, Sasuke thought, but there was something disconcerting about those words when they came from a mouth pinned up into such an empty smile. "Kakashi said that I've been away on a long solo mission. Were you my replacement for whilst I was gone?"

Yoghurt-face considered the question.

"You could say that I was, and you could say that I wasn't. Naruto and Sakura never accepted me as your replacement. I think they accepted me as myself, which is a concept I still don't entirely understand, but, with their help, perhaps I will eventually. However, yes, I took your place on Team Seven in your absence."

"How long have I – ?"

"I've been asked to refuse any questions relating to said long solo mission, your sixteen year old self's current condition and his activities in the past three years," Yoghurt-face said and smiled blandly, "but I was also told to assure you that this is all for your own good."

Sasuke felt about as assured as a manhole cover fastened on a bubbling geyser. He was fuming. What else _would_ he want to ask about?

Even if this was a genjutsu of the future, he had been presented with a Naruto and Sakura who had been teary-eyed just to see him wake up, now with this visitor with a semi-skimmed smile who Sasuke was almost certain had something against him, and, to top it all, his future self was currently stuck in hospital bedridden with a strange parasitic disease. Of course, he wanted to know what had happened to him!

"Is there anything you can tell me then?"

"I can tell you anything I make up, yes."

Sasuke shook his head to clear his thoughts, which had been quickly turning into dark mutters of _I'm-going-to-find-this-guy-back-in-my-own-time-whoever-he-is-and-_erase_-him_. "You still haven't told me why you're here."

"I was ordered to observe you with the impartiality of somebody who has less emotional investment in your predicament than others," Yoghurt-face replied with the clipped precision of a briefing committed to memory.

"By predicament, you mean, my time-travelling?" Sasuke prompted, not really expecting an answer, but it was always worth a try, and how ever his visitor reacted was something he could store away for later.

Yoghurt-face gave him another empty smile and vanished from the grill.

"Hey!" Sasuke yelled, leaping to his feet. "Wait."

He rushed forward and made to go to the door, but as the tips of his toes scraped against the thin red line, the cloth tags tightened about his ankles and he tripped and fell straight down on his knees.

He felt as though his legs had been turned to two thousand tonne blocks of iron, temple bells been strapped around his knees, and all the gravity of the world applied to the soles of his feet.

Sasuke tried to pull himself forwards with his arms. He quickly stopped. He wasn't sure he entirely liked the strained creaking noises coming from the bones in his ankles.

As he lay on his front and glared at the door, he heard returning footsteps.

"Observing again?" Sasuke growled up.

Yoghurt-face's yoghurt face was back in place in the grill with exactly the same expression as the moment he had left. "I've seen what I was sent to see."

"So why have you come back?"

"Just to warn you," replied Yoghurt-face with a smile that raised goosebumps on Sasuke's skin, "that I will be watching you, and if I find out that you've been lying to them in some way or other, I will deal with you in precisely the way I think you deserve."

Sasuke didn't need to ask who he was talking about when the young man said 'them'. He met Yoghurt-face's eyes and nodded shortly, enough to indicate that he understood the threat.

There was a sound of riffling pages as another book was consulted.

"'See you later, alligator'…." Yoghurt-face read off, then frowned in confusion. "I'm not sure I entirely understand the term. Why would I want to see an alligator again? Why does the speaker envisage an alligator in front of him as a substitute for the person he is speaking to? And why specifically an alligator? Is there something symbolic about this 'alligator' when saying goodbye?"

"It's an idiom!" Sasuke snapped as his patience unravelled. "And just who the hell are you anyway?"

Yoghurt-face once more offered that smile. It seemed as though his full repertoire of facial expression consisted of just these three expressions – smiling blank, blank and cold blank. "My name is Sai."

Yoghurt-face, now known to Sasuke as Sai, looked down at his book again. "Hmm, I will have to make a note to ask Sakura about this…idiom…later. In which case," Sai raised a hand to the grill and waved it stiffly. "See you later... Uchiha Sasuke…alligator."

Sasuke decided that he wasn't even going to deign to respond to that.

Once Sai was gone, Sasuke pulled away from the red line on the floor and flopped onto his back.

Grey stone walls around him, and grey clouds floating by the skylight above him – everything was grey.

They looked heavy those clouds, he noted absently. Perhaps they were bringing snow, although snow was a rare thing in the Land of Fire. Fire tended towards a temperate climate and was mild for most of the year, but if Sasuke was three years in the future, who was to say there hadn't been a dramatic change in climate during that period? Maybe the warmer currents in the Land of Water had shifted flow and the winds were different. Maybe more clouds were coming from the Land of Snow. Maybe they had even entered a new Ice Age…

That was, of course, if he really was three years in the future, which he still wasn't entirely convinced that he was, but whatever was happening he had a funny feeling that Sasuke wasn't very far from the heart of it.

Maybe he would wake up and it would all be a dream.

Yes, that was it. There were so many things that didn't make sense, so many things that jarred and felt inconsistent that this must be a dream of kind.

Maybe he had been getting nervous about the Chuunin Exams and those nerves had fed into this strange disjointed nightmare. He didn't want to admit feeling nervous, but given what the Chuunin Exams were known to be like it was hardly unjustified.

If that was the case, then it might just make sense that his current situation was a strange dream, spun together from whatever his subconscious dredged up, to mess with him on the night before the Chuunin Exams.

That explanation didn't sound so bad.

Sasuke closed his eyes.

_Come on, wake up_, he told himself. _It's the Exams tomorrow! You don't have time for mucking about in a stupid dream. You need real sleep. Proper sleep. You need your head clear. You need to be able to think, because there's a certain orange jump-suited idiot who probably won't be doing any thinking at all…_

_Come on, wake up..._

_Please wake up. _

* * *

Feet landed lightly on tree branches, kicked off, alighted on branches again in the dark depths of forest surrounding Konoha. They were high up in the pines, veiled in feathery shadows, and it was getting colder as the night drew on.

"There's a large group, around sixty people, due north five hundred metres away."

"Good work, Neji. Alright, team! We're going down!"

Four shapes wrapped in mottled cloaks dropped down from the trees. Their breaths steamed in the air.

"Sixty?" said Tenten, the moment she rose from her crouch. "Why so many people for a diplomatic delegation? Surely that's a borderline '_un_-diplomatic delegation'?"

"It's the first time the Koujin clan has come down the Mountain in a century. It could be a display of strength," suggested Neji, although he didn't sound convinced. "Perhaps it's to ward off lowlanders from going up the Mountain, and challenging the clan for their land?"

Guy had already started walking down the forest path towards the yellow lights that they could see between the trees. He called to his team over his shoulder, "Keep your eyes bright and beady, and ears wide and wiggling!"

They warmed their fingers under their cloaks and made towards the encampment. As they neared they heard a buzz of voices, chattering in a language that sounded very little like what they were used to hearing. Lee sniffed. The cold night air was getting to his nose and it was red and running.

"What was the name of our contact?" Guy asked, as they approached and began to make out the shapes of tents and figures clustered around fires.

"Koujin Tahei," Neji told him.

Tenten closed her eyes. "And maybe, sensei, we could keep the entrances subtle this time – "

"LO and BEHOLD, the MIGHTY BLUE BEAST OF KONOHA!"

Tenten's jaw dropped. "How the heck did he get from here to the middle of the camp in two seconds!?"

"Guy-sensei! He has most wondrous energy. Even in the dark depths of winter, see him light the way ahead with his flaming torch of youthfulness! Sensei! We are coming!" Lee went flying in after their teacher into the camp before Tenten or Neji could stop him.

"So much for subtle," Neji sighed.

"Guess we'd better hurry before they cause a diplomatic incident," Tenten said, and they followed suite.

Guy was already striking a pose on a tree-stump in the middle of the encampment, flashing a twinkling smile at the Koujin clansmen gathering around him.

From his vantage point on the tree-stump, Guy spotted several clan distinctive features. Every head had a thick mane of coppery-red hair, and every face had amber eyes. In some faces those eyes appeared gentle and warm, but in others – many of the ones currently surrounding him, he noted and felt the hairs prickle along his arms – those amber eyes made Guy think overwhelmingly of _predators_.

Wrapped in furs and skins, the clansmen hung back from the tree-stump, forming a wide circle around the ninjas as though they were fencing off an arena for a spectacle.

Lee, Tenten and Neji reached Guy just as he cleared his throat.

"Hello!" he boomed brightly. There were amused titters from the clansmen. "We are ninjas, sent from Konoha. Do not be afraid!"

The clansmen watched Guy posturing and waving without a sound. Some seemed genuinely intrigued by this strange lanky male specimen in green making funny noises on the stump in front of them.

"Maybe they don't understand us?" Tenten whispered to Lee, as Guy continued talking and the clansmen continued to watch like he was some giant prancing asparagus.

"Perhaps that is so, but did you notice?" Lee looked around the circle of clansmen with his eyebrows knitted together. "They didn't have a watch set up for their camp."

"Maybe…maybe, it's because…they're not local, so they don't know how scary the forest can be at night?" Tenten said with a nervous laugh, crushing the voice that was saying, _Maybe it's because nothing scares them_.

"Will you two stop whispering?" Neji hissed irritably, and before Tenten could call him out as a hypocrite for whispering himself, three men stepped out from the crowd.

They stood in a line. All three had heads of flaming coppery hair and bright amber eyes, but there the resemblance ended. The man on the left was tall, solid and barrel-chested, with a build like an oak. He had a low forehead and a crumpled face. The man on the right was small and hunch-backed. His legs were short and, as though to make up for that fact, his arms were absurdly long and they trailed in front of him so that their knuckles scraped the ground.

They flanked a man of middling height in the centre, who had no distinguishing feature as such, except that his eyes were curiously bright. They were so bright they were almost luminous and they didn't so much as look at Guy on the tree-stump, but snap him up into their depths. He carried his head high. His back was straight, and, all in all, it spelled a man who thought he was entitled to not only own the world, but _eat_ it.

"Konoha ninjas," spoke the man in the centre, with crisp, clean vowels. He bowed. The two on either side of him remained straight. "Welcome to our camp. Please let me introduce ourselves."

He indicated the huge man standing on his left. "This is my elder brother, Koujin Buhei, He Who Stands Tall."

Buhei remained silent and stony-faced and gave no sign that he understood what was being said.

The man in the middle then gestured down at the hunchback to his right. "This is my younger brother, Koujin Gonpei, He Who…Goes Fishing."

Tenten snorted loudly, earning her a glare from Neji that insisted she either shut up right then or die.

"And I am the middle brother, Koujin Tahei," the man finished pleasantly, dipping his head. "He Who Waits with his Palms Together. You may all call me Tahei. I appreciate that calling all of us by our surnames would be very strange, given that they all the same."

Guy stepped down from the tree-stump and went up to the bright-eyed young man. He handed Tahei a scroll. "We have been instructed by the Hokage to act as your escort and guide until you reach the village. She sent a letter in advance about the arrangements?"

"She did, and, on behalf of the Koujins, we thought that it was just the kind of gesture one would expect from a leader such as the Hokage of Konoha," Tahei replied. There was something in his voice with its dry, mocking lilt that set Tenten's teeth on edge.

She exchanged a look with Lee and Neji.

The real reason Team Guy had been sent out was to find out as much as they could about the Koujins before they reached Konoha's walls, and it seemed as though Koujin Tahei had worked that out.

Suddenly Buhei, the tall elder brother, spoke. His voice was deep and booming, and now that they heard the Koujins speaking, the Konoha ninjas realised that it wasn't a foreign language at all. It was still the common tongue, but it was so heavy and thick with dialect quirks and odd accenting they couldn't understand or follow it beyond a couple of words.

Whatever Buhei said made Tahei chuckle and look up to stare at Neji.

"My brother was just saying what lovely eyes you have."

Neji flinched and clenched his jaw but he knew better than to rise to bait.

Buhei then added something that made the Koujins standing in the circle laugh.

"Tahei-san," Guy said in a low voice, as the young man chuckled softly at Buhei's words. "There are some things in Konoha that tend to be thought of as _sensitive_ topics. They don't make especially good jokes, if you get my drift of things - be that person burning at the prime of his youth, or glowing in the autumn of his years - so if your brother is making another comment about this boy's eyes, please tell him to stop."

"But he was paying him a compliment. Buhei was simply wondering what his eyes would taste like compared to other ninja eyes."

There was a cold, frigid silence that had nothing to do with the sharp winter chill.

"My apologies." Tahei bowed his head again to Guy, but very pointedly not to Neji, who was twitching and quivering with all sorts of ticks of barely suppressed rage. "Cultural differences. Jokes don't always translate so well between tongues. Now! I will take you to meet our Elders. They have been looking forward to meeting with Konoha ninjas very, very much. Please make yourselves feel at home. Until we reach Konoha, you are our guests."

Tahei turned, and the crowd of Koujins parted to form a path for him and his brothers. He beckoned over his shoulder for Guy, Neji, Tenten and Lee to follow. "Come. Come this way."

* * *

Oh, the irony, Sasuke thought pithily, as he opened his eyes.

He had tried desperately to wake up. All that seemed to have accomplished was that he had closed his eyes and gone promptly to sleep.

Now he was dreaming. He really was dreaming.

He was on the pier of the lake, standing and looking out over what was usually the water but in his dream it was ice. Shining like a mirror, the lake was completely frozen, iced over white with dark green bruises where the ice was thinner.

All the banks were white, covered in snow that was course and dense and crumbled into powder in Sasuke's fists, but didn't melt.

No. None of it would melt. He shoved his hand into a drift of snow piled against the side of the pier. It came away cold and raw, but never wet. The ice was the same. He broke off the tip of an icicle and rubbed it between his fingers and he gave up when his patience melted first.

It was still, in the way that winters tended to be on those white grey mornings, when snow covered tree branches and stuck to bark at impossible angles, so that everything always looked poised to fall, if it had not already frozen in freefall.

_What else was there in the dream?_

He could warm his hands with his breath. His legs were fine so long as he kept on moving. He thought, in a kind of dream daze, that he might try to explore the land beyond the banks around the lake and trudged through the snow up to the top of the ridge.

But every time Sasuke thought he had reached the top, he would suddenly find that he had done a U-turn, and that he was facing the wooden pier jutting over the lake again.

_What did this dream want him to do? Jump off the pier? He'd done that as a child once, hadn't he?_

He went back down to the pier, snow crunching under the soles of his feet and between his toes, then slippery wooden boards. The edge of the pier came sooner than he expected. It was as though the dream was pushing him forward, chasing him on, throwing him onto the ice in the same way it had turned him back from the top of the bank.

He landed solidly on both his feet. Held his breath.

Nothing. No cracks, no shattering ice, no sudden vaporisation of ice into a great big pit. He wouldn't put it past it in a dream world for that to happen.

He took a few more tentative steps, planting each foot gently into the lake surface and testing the strength of the ice before committing his weight to it. When he had grown more confident, he strode out into the lake centre and looked up at the sky.

Where the lake was all white and shades of palest blue, the sky was ablaze with colours.

Yellows, pinks, greens and reds clustered together like bunches of grapes and clouds of stars, forming a huge geometric pattern overhead. It reminded Sasuke of a stained glass bowl.

As Sasuke watched, the sky _twisted_. There was a rushing noise, of glass beads rattling in a metal drum, and Sasuke realised with a jolt just what he was looking at.

The sky above him was a kaleidoscope image.

He stared, and the sky twisted again. He heard the rush of beads once more and the pattern of colours changed.

Movement in the periphery of his vision.

He spun, heart racing, eyes wide, and looked down to find a patch of thin green ice, that had appeared out of nowhere and nearly crept up to his ankles.

The centre of the ice patch was thin enough to see straight through into the lake below.

Pitch black water swirled and boiled in a torrent so violent Sasuke wondered how the ice was holding up against it. The water was roaring. The water was frothing, and it lashed at the bottom of the ice like it wanted to scour it all away.

For a fleeting instant, a hand appeared in it.

A white hand with battered nails - it reached out, and scratched on the ice above it, scrabbled furiously for purchase, before it was tugged away by the waters.

And after the hand was a face – thin, white and angry. Sasuke didn't recognise it. It surfaced from the dark water and smacked its forehead into the bottom of the ice sheet. Locking tired eyes with Sasuke, it sunk away.

And after the face came thousands of snakes. They rushed past like a shoal of white, wriggling fish, flowing by in a writhing current that didn't seem to end, snake upon snake upon snake upon snake...

The sky twisted. Glass beads rattled.

That was the point where Sasuke woke up and found that he was still in the strange domed room, three years in his future.

* * *

**If you're confused, if you smirked, if you enjoyed even a snippet of it, if the Koujins are creepy, drop me a review and let me know, because I always love to know. ;) **

**Thank you for reading!  
**

**Best, Zen :D**


	3. Guilty Parties

**Disclaimer: The characters are the property of Masashi Kishimoto and the Naruto franchise.**

**Author's Note: Hello again! I am back with another chapter of Dream of Winter. Now, before we start, firstly I would like to say thank you to Ser Serendipity, kasinka613, Rosebunse and Just-A-Dude for your reviews . It's lovely when readers come back and your support really does push me to try and deliver something. Secondly, thank you to Van der Ay, wellperhapsnot and BladesofRays, and welcome on board! :) **

**I seem to have picked up quite a number of readers since last time and I honestly don't know what to say. It took me around sixteen chapters on Spring of the Plague to gain a similar audience. I believe I have Ser Serendipity to thank for that, but anyhow, new readers, it's lovely to meet you, thank you for joining me, and I really hope I can answer to your expectations. **

**This chapter was painful to write - so many people with hidden interests and false interests, all tip-toeing around each other, so many surfaces and underneaths. ****I really do apologise for Danzo and Itachi. It is very formal, but it needed to be done. Those two were not going to be cracking any jokes. Not at all. Anyway, i**t was so painful it went to 15000 words, so I'm cutting it and splitting the content into two. The good news is, that means that Chapter 4 may be out much sooner than expected and Chapter 4 is a bit more fun. 

**Without further ado, I hope you enjoy this installment of Dream of Winter. Best, Zen :D**

* * *

"'If there are any developments with my brother, let me know'? Like hell are we going to let him know! Who does he think he is?" Naruto slammed his chopsticks over his second bowl of ramen and immediately raised a finger to order a third. Teuchi took it in good humour. "If Itachi thinks he can just swan back into Konoha and start acting all like a brother again, he's got another thing coming."

"As much as I wish to agree with those sentiments, Naruto, if we have any problems with Sasuke, Uchiha Itachi will be the first person we have to inform, whether you like it or not." Kakashi set down his glass of water and adjusted his mask over his nose (and once again Naruto and Sakura inwardly chorused, _Damn! How does he do it?_). "After all, Itachi was the one who cast the jutsu. If we discover any flaws or complications with it, we're dependent on him to fix them."

The thought of being dependent on Uchiha Itachi of all people made Sakura's skin crawl, and Naruto's grumbling beside her made it clear that he liked the idea about as much as he liked all noodle-based catering being banned from Konoha.

"We can't trust him, Kakashi-sensei."

"I'm not saying that we should, Naruto. It's unlikely that Itachi's told Tsunade the entire truth concerning why he left the Akatsuki, but, for now we have to trust in his abilities." Kakashi rolled the ice cubes at the bottom of his glass of water. "From what little we know of Itachi, at least we know that he's a man who never does things by halves. We can rely on him having done whatever it is that he's done – I'm not even going to pretend to understand what he did - completely perfectly. The question is: Has the jutsu been cast perfectly to suit our intentions, Itachi's intentions or somebody else's even more mysterious intentions?"

"I don't know about any 'intentions'," Naruto huffed indignantly, "but if we just let Itachi do whatever he likes, Sensei, don't you think it's like we're betraying Sasuke? I'm not buying Itachi's Mr Nice Guy act. If there's anything Itachi is _not_, it's nice. He's definitely up to something."

"Oh, there's no doubt about that."

"Sensei," Sakura spoke up at last, setting down her chopsticks across her bowl, "don't you have some idea about why Itachi's helping us with Sasuke?"

"I can't say that I don't," Kakashi said warily, and as Sakura and Naruto both looked at him to go on, he thought of the events of the day and the events of the past three difficult weeks and simply couldn't find it in himself refuse them. "Uchiha Itachi was an ANBU officer once, and a talented one at that. He has a unique skill-set. His field experience is paralleled by few, and, if he's serious about his re-allegiance to Konoha, his mercenary experience with the Akatsuki could give the ANBU an invaluable insight into the activities of the other nations. His reputation alone could be used as a considerable psychological pressure. Itachi would be a formidable weapon if Konoha could have him on her side again."

Naruto furrowed his brow. "What's Sasuke got to do with all that?"

"I suspect that the ANBU wanted Itachi to demonstrate his loyalty in some form, so that they could speed up the process of putting him back into action and have him on standby when our guests from the Mountain are here."

Sakura's eyes widened with understanding. "The ANBU were testing Itachi, by seeing what he would do when he cast the jutsu on Sasuke."

"Not quite, Sakura, but close. Many were curious as to how Itachi would behave when presented with Sasuke and the reminder of his most notorious crime, but the main question was whether Itachi would seize the opportunity the jutsu-casting gave him to capture the Kyuubi Jinchuuriki and take him back to the Akatsuki."

Naruto spewed soup all over the counter. "What!?"

Sakura pursed her lips and turned over some ideas. "I guess if the ANBU were testing Itachi, today would have been a good day for it. He had his first aspergilloma operation in the morning, so he should have been feeling weaker than usual, and if he really did try to capture Naruto, he wouldn't have been able to get very far."

"Even post-invasive surgery, Sakura, I think it's highly doubtful that Uchiha Itachi would have been taken down so easily. The ANBU took a considerable gamble today. They're obviously in a hurry about something."

"But if Itachi's going to be working for the ANBU again, then that means he isn't going to answer for his crimes! That's just plain wrong," Naruto said indignantly, full of righteous fury. "Itachi killed the whole of Sasuke's family - his _own_ family! There's no way he should be allowed to get away with that."

"Some say, Naruto, that being conscripted into certain factions of the ANBU is a fate worse than death, so Itachi might not be getting away with anything at all, but this is all opinion and speculation," said Kakashi firmly, looking both his students in the eye so that Naruto and Sakura both understood that nothing of what they were discussing was to go any further than the hangings on the front of Ichiraku's shop. "For now, we'll just have to wait and see. It's a pity that Morino Ibiki and Yamanaka Inoichi are out of action still. It would have been useful to hear what they made of Uchiha Itachi."

"Tsunade-sama said that the ANBU interrogation unit gave Itachi the all clear," Sakura pointed out.

"Much of ANBU is a law unto itself. It'll do as it sees fit so long as the ends justify the means, and Shimura Danzo's power on the council has ensured for many years that there are just enough legal loopholes that allow the ANBU to do so." There was the usual subtle drop in temperature, irrespective of the cold weather, that accompanied any mention of the murkier levels of Konoha that nobody ever really wanted to talk about. It was like acknowledging the sewage that was flowing under the roads. "Politics, children - try not to get involved if possible."

Konoha's weapon of mass destruction, confined in the body of a teenager, and the young apprentice of Konoha's supreme leader, both failed to see the irony in Kakashi's advice, and so they continued to suck up noodles, gnaw char siu, and sip their cups of water, lapsing into a minute of quiet contemplation and contented lunching.

"Hey, Sakura-chan?" Naruto spoke up, when the silence was starting to drag. "Didn't you go to see Ino yesterday? How is she doing?"

"I didn't stay for long, but I think she's doing fine," Sakura answered with more conviction than she felt. "Apparently comas aren't unusual for the Yamanakas when something goes wrong with their jutsus, so she seemed optimistic, but Ino's always been tough."

Naruto scratched the back of his head and grimaced. "I still feel bad about what happened to her dad."

"It was Hokage's orders, Naruto. Nobody is to blame, and besides, both Inoichi and Ibiki have interrogated minds far more dangerous and gone than Sasuke's and remained relatively sane enough to tell to tale." Kakashi tried to assure him. "They will be back on their feet any day soon."

"Yeah, but…still…" Naruto trailed off, then suddenly he swivelled round on his stool and turned to Sakura with wide, questioning eyes. "So what's up with you, Sakura-chan?"

Sakura started with a jolt and her elbow slipped off the table. "What are you talking about, Naruto?"

"You've been really quiet the whole time," Naruto noted, with an emphatic jab of his chopsticks. "Like, this whole day! The whole time we were with Sasuke! You hardly said anything, so I figured maybe you were angry at something, so I thought maybe you'd had an argument with Ino again…hey, Kakashi-sensei, back me up on this! Don't you think she's been weirdly quiet today?"

"Hmm, well, usually I would say, 'Don't drag me into this', but, since I'm the one who scraped the together the money, up from the goodly pockets of my heart, for that bowl of untouched ramen," Kakashi's eye flicked down to the ramen cooling in front of Sakura with its stretched noodles and barely picked at toppings, "I'm inclined to say that Naruto has a point."

Sakura felt a twinge of guilt as Kakashi spoke. It seemed as though she wasn't going to get away with the avoiding the subject any longer, so she gathered together her thoughts and tried to make sense of them. "I…" she started, then stopped, waited for the right words to spring to mind.

In the end, she kept it simple. She turned on the stool until she was facing both Kakashi and Naruto along the counter, and said bluntly, "I don't like what we're doing to him."

"Who?" Kakashi rolled his eye and cuffed Naruto on the back of the head. "Ow! Sensei!"

"That's only natural, Sakura," said Kakashi, ignoring Naruto's scowling, "and it's not a feeling to be ashamed of. It's understandable that you're uncomfortable with how things have turned out, especially with Naruto's…complication of the situation."

"I just can't help thinking: What if we've done something really bad to Sasuke-kun with that jutsu?" The worried words tumbled from Sakura in a barely controlled rush and she clenched her hands. "What if we've only made things worse? What if what we've done stops him from ever coming back to us at all? And, then...look at what we're doing to him now. We're hiding so much, we're…we're basically lying to him!"

"Sakura-chan." She felt strong hands seize her shoulders and looked up into Naruto's fiercely determined face. "We're not lying to Sasuke."

"But – "

"Think about it. Yeah, I know, it's kind of complicated, and I get where you're coming from, but, Sakura-chan, wasn't it amazing when he woke up? You seemed so happy! It was the happiest I'd seen you in the whole of these three weeks!"

"I was happy, Naruto," she admitted reluctantly. "Believe me. I was, but the reality of all this hadn't sunken in then. It's a bit different now – "

"Sakura-chan, it's okay. Relax. You're taking all this way too seriously. The time-travelling stuff – think of it as a bit of fun. It's only going to be temporary anyway." Naruto sat back on his stool and pulled Sakura's unfinished bowl of ramen towards him. When she didn't make any move to snatch it back, he snapped apart a fresh pair of chopsticks and gave her a reassuring smile. "Once they work out how to really fix Sasuke's head, it'll be like none of this weird stuff with Itachi and that crazy jutsu ever happened. We might as well have a laugh with it while we can."

"So, you're not going to forget about him are you?" Sakura demanded, watching Naruto closely. " 'Sixteen year old Sasuke'. Our Sasuke, Naruto. Right here and right now, he's the _real_ problem. He's the one we need to deal with."

Naruto stopped muttering under his breath about how Sakura had let the noodles go soggy just long enough to say, "I know that," then dug into the bowl.

Kakashi gestured over the counter. "Could we have the bill please?"

Teuchi handed it over the counter on a blue plastic tray. After scanning the items, Kakashi opened his mouth to point out the clear discrepancy between the number of bowls stacked at Naruto's elbow and the number on the bill, but when he looked up, the old man smiled at him and winked. "On the house."

It had been a while since Teuchi had seen Team Seven look anything as lively as he had seen them today. For the past three weeks, he might as well have been serving sleepwalkers.

Kakashi gave him a grateful nod, and left a couple of notes on the tray with no intention of collecting the change.

Naruto left Ichiraku's at a run, racing ahead to tell Tsunade the 'Good News', as he called it, whirling round only to shout down the street for Sakura and Kakashi to hurry up before leaping to the rooftops.

"Sakura. I was pleased to hear that the current situation doesn't sit well with you." Sakura looked round from Naruto waving at them from the top of a billboard, and found Kakashi standing beside her. He had his eye trained on Naruto's distant shape. "I was, in fact, a little relieved. Keep hold of those thoughts. We might come to need them, one of these days."

_In case our grip on the here and now, and the reality of our situation, starts to slide._

Sakura nodded, smiled, more than a little reassured now that she knew her concerns weren't a sign that she was getting cold feet and failing her teammates. "Understood, Sensei."

_Although for some, it might already be sliding. _

* * *

Rumours flying here, rumours flying there, flittering and clinging to the ears their found with tiny hooked claws, like bats, and in the criminal underground they flew like bats in caves. Their echoes bounced and rebounded in the dark, until the first utterings of the rumour had all but faded to a ghostly image and a formless whisper.

The chill of the wind is formless. It lingers as an impression on the skin, and by the time Konoha ninjas first came to hear of the goings on at Sound, the rumour had already lost its definition and become just that: An impression, a gut feeling, a strong sense that something had happened in the Sound.

Team Eight were on a mission when they first got wind of the rumour.

They had been investigating a commune developing on the Land of Iron border. Outwardly it was doing nothing more deadly than growing mulberry and breeding silkworms with an eye for entering the silk trade, but Konoha had reason to suspect that not all was as it seemed. Initial reports suggested that it was growing 'medicinal herbs' for the black market on the side and, perhaps more worryingly, a team of Konoha jutsu researchers had recently disappeared without a trace nearby.

Between Kiba's nose, Hinata's eyes and Shino's a thousand ears of his clouds of insects, an impression even as vague as the one they caught from the black market was more than enough for Team Eight to track it back to its source.

Once they had the startled a former Sound ninja out of his sleep from beneath the floorboards of a civilian house, the impression began to take on definition.

Once Kiba had set Akamaru at the Sound ninja's throat, squatted down in front of the trembling man, and started, casually, asking some leading questions, with Akamaru squeezing and relaxing his jaws on the Sound ninja's windpipe (never quite sinking in his teeth, but never leaving any room to doubt that the dog could do it faster than the man could say, 'Snap!'), the impression became useful information at last.

The Sound ninja told them (wheezed at them, from between Akamaru's teeth) that one of Orochimaru's test subjects had gone berserk in a laboratory complex, and that Orochimaru himself had vanished, most likely dead in the rampage. Eventually somebody blew up the laboratory entrance to stop the thing getting out, and now leaderless the few ninjas there had been at the Sound had scattered.

He didn't know what had happened to Sasuke. He didn't know what had happened to Kabuto either. Kabuto, however, had long made an art out of being the forgettable face in the crowd and coming and going unnoticed, so it was more than likely that he was alive somewhere and lying low.

That the Sound ninja didn't know what had happened to Sasuke, even if he had little to do with the boy was worrying. Sasuke was no Kabuto. He was not forgettable, and he certainly didn't go unnoticed in the way that Kabuto did. Oh, Sasuke could melt out of existence in a blink of an eye like any other ninja, but everything he did – his vanishing, his attacking, his moving - carried a very assured sense of _I AM ME_ that Kabuto didn't have. Call it flavour, if you will. If Kabuto was air then Sasuke was smoke.

People noticed smoke. If it suddenly appeared, something had happened, and if it suddenly disappeared, something had happened as well. It was no win either way.

Team Eight returned to Konoha, and Team Seven left before anybody could stop them.

More accurately, Naruto left first as soon as Kiba blurted the news in his face; Sakura went chasing after Naruto fifteen minutes later after; and then it was an impressive domino chain of Kakashi, Sai, and Yamato all insisting that they were setting out to stop Naruto and Sakura, because of collective responsibility, looking out for teammates, etcetera, etcetera, until they were all, rather conveniently, too far from the walls of Konoha for anybody to think that stopping them was seriously an option anymore.

They found the sealed up laboratory complex using the landmarks that Kiba and Akamaru had shaken, by the throat, out of the Sound ninja, spent time they dared not think they didn't have pulling away blasted rocks and twisted metal from its front until they had broken through and their hands and knuckles were cut and bloody.

Deep inside, they found a body.

It wasn't Itachi, however much it looked like him.

Deeper inside, they found Sasuke.

But it wasn't Sasuke, however much it…to be honest, it didn't really look much like him either, and as for finding him, it was probably a more accurate description to say that Sasuke found them.

Sai had a feeling they only managed to bring Sasuke down because one week underground with little food and a depleting air supply tended to have that effect on people.

The way Naruto saw things they had found Sasuke. Sasuke was in there somewhere. If you found a cup noodle, you found the noodles in the cup. At least, that's what he hoped, and told himself over and over again in the nights that came after.

The way Sakura saw things they had found Sasuke, but not brought him back.

The way Kakashi saw things they had found and brought back a massive headache, but leaving that headache behind or letting it go or putting it down had never been an option in the first place.

The way Yamato and Sai saw things, the rest of the team were suffering from being too stubborn for their own good, to know when it might be time to give up, but without that streak of bloody-minded pig-headedness, Team Seven would, quite simply, not be Team Seven.

* * *

The story Itachi was going with went something like this.

Itachi had left the Akatsuki when they discovered that he was ill – terminally so, if he did not receive treatment. It certainly would have been terminal if Itachi had stuck around the Akatsuki any longer. The Akatsuki would have tried to kill him before he became a liability.

Three weeks after Team Seven brought Sasuke back to Konoha the night watch were startled by the a sudden appearance of a murder of crows at midnight.

They looked down from the watch-tower – saw a man, knocking at the gates, back to face his crimes.

* * *

His ANBU guards were silent as they escorted Itachi back to their headquarters, but he didn't need them to speak to know what they were thinking.

By rights he should have been blindfolded, but it was the ANBU interrogation unit that had cleared Itachi of suspected malicious intent and it would have proclaimed lack of confidence in their own practices if the ANBU had then insisted his eyes be covered, and the ANBU couldn't have that.

The guards were young, mostly. That didn't mean much in the ANBU. Field experience was what mattered and if you started young so much the better.

Out in the field, it was all about who you were when you were up to your knees in mud and your comrades were lying still, and your enemies were creeping ever closer with their blades held between their teeth and their teeth bared white. Age didn't make much of a difference.

Still, they were young, and likely they had grown up hearing about Itachi from Chuunins and Jounins and, even within the ANBU itself, as something of a cautionary tale: _Listen well, juniors, we're going to tell you a story today. We're going to tell you about Those Ninjas That Went Bad._

They walked either self-consciously stiffly or with long strides of false bravado, and their hands, when they swung them, ventured involuntarily close to their weapons pouches, as though they were resisting the urge to stretch and touch and take comfort from their presence. He could almost smell the fear oozing from their pores.

Itachi almost pitied them. They were afraid because he had once been one of them. The young officers were terrified that they were looking at a vision of their own future, or, worse still, the future of somebody they cared for. What if one day they got too good at what they did and simply couldn't stop when they went home? What would they do if a friend suddenly snapped and went on a bloody killing spree? What if, with all those missions they did, the ones they couldn't talk about, the ones _nobody_ talked about, they were all slowly turning into somebody like him?

That was a lot of 'what ifs'.

One hour after his arrival, Danzo had appeared at the holding cell, demanding an explanation for Itachi's return. Itachi had been working to protect Konoha from within the Akatsuki, sending information as to their movements and directing it away from Konoha whenever possible. If that Itachi had returned, then perhaps there was some great threat was on its way that Danzo needed to prepare for.

It worked to both their advantage that Danzo knew of Itachi's mission. Danzo could give Itachi the freedom to move in the shadows, and in return, he would receive the results of Itachi's investigation. As much as Itachi disliked the man, he wasn't one to let personal likes and dislikes get in the way of what he needed to do to achieve what he wanted, and Danzo was much the same. They would get along if that was what was required of them.

"Leave us," said Danzo, looking up from his documents at last. Once all of the ANBU, except the one in the round blank mask, code-named Mu, who went to stand behind Danzo's shoulder, had left the office, Danzo gestured to the chair in front of him. "Normally I would have men stand in my presence, but since Mu tells me you had surgery this morning, you may sit."

"Thank you."

"You don't seem as pleased as I thought you would be, Itachi."

"I am as pleased as I can be."

"But I heard it all went well. Isn't that so, Sai?" Danzo suddenly addressed the fourth person in the room, a white-faced young man with a face so blank it might have been painted onto wood.

Sai bowed and stood to attention. "Yes, sir."

"I sent Sai to observe your brother in the moments after he awoke." Danzo gestured for Sai to stand down and the boy stepped back into the shadows. "His report was very positive. You should be pleased with what you accomplished, Itachi. The jutsu was a success, and yet, I feel as though there is something in you that resists me."

"Unless you are referring to some inborn family tendency to resist or rebel - in which case, as you well know, I will not refute you on that matter - I can't imagine what you mean."

Danzo's eyebrow twitched. His hand quivered on the desk. Itachi glanced down at the hand and then up to Danzo's bandaged face.

_That was the hand that tore out one of Shisui's eyes. That was the socket in which he stored that stolen eye_.

Itachi was no stranger to the temptation of revenge. He understood it intimately enough to know that that was how it needed to remain, a mere temptation, or else any small chance for peace would be lost to the storms.

Sometimes it occurred to him that driving Sasuke onto the path of revenge contradicted his ideals, but the thought did not trouble him, because Itachi knew that, however much he desired peace, after all he had done he was the last person in the world who deserved it.

Sasuke was supposed to have been his punishment. Where had it all gone wrong?

Danzo jerked his chin at the ANBU behind him and over to the corner where Sai was still standing to attention. "Sai, Mu, leave."

They bowed and left the room. As the sounds of their footsteps had faded down the corridor, Danzo began to talk. "Uchiha Itachi, who do you think you are, at this very moment?"

"I would say I am a Konoha shinobi playing an Akatsuki member, playing an ex-Akatsuki member trying to play a Konoha shinobi. It's complicated but manageable."

"In this room, yes, but beyond these walls in Konoha, no," said Danzo shortly. "You, Itachi, are the young man who killed his clan, in a fit of insanity the likes of which had never been seen before. Your photograph is an insert in every ninja, criminal and child psychology textbook along with a case study on psychopathy. Your name appears in debates on the nature of evil, and, although the jury is still out as to whether you are subhuman or superhuman, the general consensus is that you are inhuman and most definitely a monster."

"That is quite understandable," said Itachi sincerely. "I certainly wouldn't disagree."

"Would you agree with me then that, as this is what everybody believes, and what everybody believes is the truth, for the sake of all those enjoying what peace it is that we have bought them, that this must remain as the truth?"

"I would agree, yes."

Danzo's eye bored into him, sharp as a hawk's, hard as flint. "In that case, Itachi, you do not threaten me by dropping hints, however subtle they may be, as to the truth of the Massacre in front of my subordinates or anybody in Konoha for that matter. Is that clear?"

"Clear, yes," replied Itachi lightly, "but, I hope it is also clear that my brother Sasuke is to be left well alone."

Danzo pressed his lips together into a thin, flat line. "Need I remind you, Itachi, that your brother is only alive because I gave you an option that allowed him to be spared?"

"And for that option, I am eternally grateful, of course."

"And yet, when I ordered you to use that jutsu to save your brother, you resisted the idea." Danzo stopped drumming his fingers on the pommel of his cane and peered into Itachi's carefully blank face, "and I can see that you resist it still, even though the deed has been done and it was your suggestion to begin with, and you have only gained from the exercise. You must know this."

Itachi did know this. The Akatsuki were watching him and his actions in Konoha and if Konoha didn't try to test his loyalty they would have been suspicious. Casting the jutsu had reunited Itachi with Sasuke and presented with the Kyuubi Jinchuuriki.

"It was a fair initial test of my credibility," he decided to say.

Danzo nodded in agreement. "Indeed, it was. If the Akatsuki are expecting you to make a concerted effort to at appear as though you've returned repentant, they ought to be satisfied with that as a beginning."

"Largely satisfied, yes, however – "

"However, it won't be enough," Danzo cut in, and Itachi fought the urge to grit his teeth with some amusement. It had been a while since anybody had dared to interrupt him. "You will need more opportunities in which to show that you are trustworthy. I have told the Hokage that the ANBU interrogation unit has assessed you as such, but words are not enough. Konoha demands actions, which is only to be expected. We are ninjas, after all, not priests. We will have to find something for you to do here. I am correct in assuming that you will be returning to the Akatsuki, of course? After all this finished?"

"I know that my place is beyond Konoha's walls, and that that is where the people here need me. I will make no insistence to stay."

The thought that Itachi wasn't going to be sticking around longer than necessary seemed to put Danzo at ease. He nodded, pulled out a sheet of paper from his desk drawer, followed by a brush, a seal, and a pot of red paste.

He talked as he wrote out a letter. "A rogue ninja of your reputation would not usually be accepted back into the ninja ranks at all, but with your background and potential"- _and my political influence, _it went unsaid, but Itachi could read silences like books – "it will not be difficult to justify you as a special case. I shall tell Tsunade that I want you in my personal guard, where you'll be under surveillance by the finest ANBU in the village and away from the main running of the town. She will see the sense in this. Better to keep a falcon in an eyrie than a dovecote. The officers will ensure that you don't see more than what is relevant to your mission."

And in event of Itachi returning to the Akatsuki, Danzo would be able to legitimately say that Itachi had remained under suspicion and surveillance during the whole of his time in Konoha and escape any truly damaging wounds to his reputation.

"What will you tell the officers?" Itachi asked, as the letter to Tsunade took shape in front of him.

"That I do not trust the Hokage's soft methods and I want you under _my_ surveillance, but that I intend to make full use of you in the meantime," Danzo spelled out, the tip of his brush trailing down the paper. "A few of rumours spread here and there that your loyalties to the Akatsuki might not have been entirely cut should keep the men on their toes around you. I'm sure they will help you keep focused on your investigation, and if those rumours remain in circulation nobody will be at all surprised when you leave."

Reasonable enough, however – Itachi steepled his fingers in front of him. "If I were the Hokage I might suspect that you were recruiting me for your own purposes."

"You mean to arm myself with tools with which I could undermine her. She will, of course, suspect, but that is nothing unusual," said Danzo dismissively, as though having the Hokage suspect that he was up to something dark and dastardly was all part of a day's work. "My purposes are Konoha's wellbeing and future, and I am fully within my rights to demand the tools fit to meet them. With the arrival of our _interesting guests_ from the Mountain, I'm sure even she will understand that it will be good to have you in the wings."

He finished the final symbol on his letter with a flourish and stamped his seal on the bottom left corner. "You can work for me on investigating the Koujins, and, although I realise I ordered you to keep your distance from your brother, when I call for it, Itachi, you will help us with controlling him as well. There, that should satisfy your Akatsuki agenda, as well as mine. Are there any problems?"

"None," he hesitated, and the 'however' that he had wanted to speak out earlier resurfaced from the back of his mind, "however, I do not think including Sasuke in any plans concerning Konoha's security is a wise decision. He would only be a liability. He shouldn't – "

"The plans concerning Konoha's security are not for you to question. As it is, your brother's predicament is what brought those savages down from their godforsaken mountain in the first place." Danzo laid a knife across the letter and folded the paper using the blade's edge. There was a low _zip! _"It is impossible to exclude him. Now that you've made him manageable, I see no excuse for him not to make himself useful when the time comes."

Wood creaked before Itachi realised that he had tightened his grip on his arm-rests. Danzo's eye flicked up at the sound.

Itachi slowly uncurled and flexed his fingers. He took another deep breath.

"I thought it might be something like that – your insistence that I use that jutsu, the efficiency with which you made the arrangements," Itachi listed, and he was astonished at the bitter inflection in his own voice, even though his face remained blank. "That was why you were so pleased that it worked, but, no, I can't pretend that I am surprised. I knew what you were hoping, and I went ahead and cast the jutsu anyway."

"When the need arises to fight fire with fire, you will see that what you did was undoubtedly the right thing for this town."

"You seem already certain that Koujins are a threat," Itachi noted with amusement.

"Anything novel is a threat, and that is a certainty of mine that has saved this village time and time again." Danzo slowly smoothed the creases out of the folded paper with a thumb until the letter was flattened to perfection. "The fact that nobody knows this is a testament to how successful I've been. Now, I shall have Mu deliver this to the Hokage later. I have nothing more to say to you, so you may leave."

Itachi had not been so abruptly dismissed for eight years. Now a part of him wanted to lean back in the chair, stretch out his legs, and remind Danzo just who exactly the old man was trying to throw out from his office like a common Konoha officer - a psychopath, a lost cause, and a monster in human skin.

_He could kill him in the blink of an eye. _

"Do you have anything more you wish to say to me?" Danzo asked when Itachi hadn't moved from the chair.

_Better than that. He could make Danzo kill himself in the blink of an eye._

But he wouldn't. Those were the instincts of Akatsuki-Itachi, the empty man, the easiest mask for Itachi to put on and the hardest to put away, and for this mission investigating the Koujins, he needed to set that mask temporarily aside and go back, however briefly, to being a Konoha man.

"Nothing comes to mind."

It was like trying to slip back into clothes he had already grown out of.

Perhaps that was a sign that he had been growing only too comfortable in his Akatsuki cloak.

* * *

**More pieces of the puzzle. Have you got the corners yet? If you are confused, more confused, still confused, less confused, found something intriguing, or if you can imagine Itachi checking his nails and pining for his Akatsuki manicurist as Danzo drones on over him...Well, maybe not the last one, drop me a review and let me know. I love reader speculation. ;)**

**Next time: Team Seven relocate, Kakashi is late, the Koujins aren't amused and Sasuke's problems get worse.  
**

**Thanks for reading, and see you soon!  
**

**Zen :D**

**Best, Zen :D**


	4. Bowing Puppets

**Disclaimer: The characters are the property of Masashi Kishimoto and the Naruto franchise.**

**Author's Note: Hello, again! Welcome back to another chapter of Dream of Winter. First off, I would like to say thank you to Ser Serendipity, Rosebunse and kasinka613 for your reviews and continued support. It gives no end of joy to get that little e-mail notification, and know that this little puzzler is entertaining! AlmostElectric, thank you so much for your in depth review, and I'm glad you've liked it so far. :) Secondly, thank you to all who have favourited or followed since!**

**I think some of you have noticed I've been struggling with this story in a way I didn't struggle with Plague at all until the final chapters. I'm going to, therefore, take a break from writing this for a bit, sit back and come back ready to keep on writing this. At the moment, I've been trying to do this at the same time as another story and it's actually getting difficult to sleep because my head's buzzing all the time. I'm not handling the two as well as I wish I was, so please allow me this holiday , without further ado, here is Dream of Winter 4, and I hope you enjoy this installment, Best, Zen :D  
**

* * *

The Koujin elders were grim and stony-faced as gargoyles, and the green tea that Shizune had set down in front of them had been left pointedly untouched.

Koujin Tahei, however, had picked up his tea in both his hands. He sucked up the tea between his teeth in the swelling silence like he was using it to rinse his mouth, until the old man finally spoke in the Koujins' impenetrable dialect.

Tahei set down his tea. "The Grand Elder Tetsu is unhappy. He says that he was most displeased by what you showed us today."

"I can understand his disappointment, but we had no intention of misleading you." Tsunade paused to allow Tahei to relay this back to the Elder before continuing on. "We explicitly stated in our letters that the individual we retrieved from Orochimaru's laboratory was not the young man you were looking for. As an apology for any disappointment we might have caused, Konoha will gladly provide ninjas to aid your search for Koujin Juugo. We are also willing to pay a sum of money as a reward for information as to Juugo's whereabouts – "

"Hokage-sama," Tahei his hands together as though in prayer, and there was something in the way Tahei tacked 'sama' onto the end of her title made Tsunade feel that, to the Koujins, her title carried little more weight than a paper crown, "- that we are disappointed goes without saying. We had such high hopes that, after all these years, we would finally be reunited with our long-lost clansman, even though it was almost certain that we hoped in vain. If we are disappointed, then since we allowed ourselves to be blinded by hope, it is nobody's fault but our own."

Tsunade looked hard at Tahei and the Koujin Elders sitting silently beside him. "That is very gracious of you."

"However," Tahei showed his teeth with a wide, white, sharp-toothed smile, "what my venerable Elder said was that he was _displeased_, Hokage-sama. Not disappointed. He is displeased that you have allowed that…ah, what is the word?"

He snapped his fingers and looked to Elder Tetsu, as though for guidance or inspiration, but Tsunade had spent enough time around Jiraiya and Orochimaru to recognise a showman when she saw one.

"Ah, yes!" Tahei exclaimed. "Abomination. That _abomination…_to remain alive for so long since discovering him. We find the boy's continued existence offensive."

"If that is because Uchiha Sasuke has been given a Curse Seal that mimics the Koujin kekkei genkai and you object to how your kekkei genkai has been twisted for Orochimaru's purposes, I can understand that you would feel insulted. However," Tsunade folded her arms and lowered her voice, "that is not yet a good enough reason for Uchiha Sasuke to be killed."

"_She appears angry, Tahei. What is she saying?" _Elder Tetsu whispered, peering anxiously at Tsunade's face as the old man tried to decipher the strange sounds entering his ears.

Tahei kept his tone even as he replied. "_The pale-haired bitch is questioning our ways and making excuses for keeping the Fake alive." _

The Elder woman shuffled uncomfortably in her seat. "_Tahei, be careful, this is the Hokage you are speaking to. A little respect more would not go amiss." _

"_Be careful? A little respect?" _Tahei repeated incredulously and the Elder Hatsu flinched under his burning gaze. "_Elder Hatsu, did the Elders not teach us that the Koujins do not bow to prey?" _

"_We Elders hoped to teach your generation pride, yes." _Hatsu exchanged a fearful look with Tetsu. "_Tahei, it is good to see the young so proud of the clan name, but, perhaps - "_

Tahei stopped her with a look that carried no threat, absolutely no threat at all, only a promise, and returned to Tsunade, who had been watching the discussion with narrowed eyes.

"It is not the bastardised version of our kekkei genkai that the boy carries that offends us, Hokage-sama. Our issue is with his condition."

"Has your clan dealt with something similar to Sasuke's condition before?" Tsunade asked. That the Koujins might have a solution for Sasuke's 'problem', as they all referred to it these days, was the main reason she had agreed for them to visit him.

"Oh, we've dealt with it many times."

"Then is there a way to break him out of it?"

Tahei blinked slowly. "Not that we know of."

"Then how do you - ?" Tsunade started to ask when realisation struck her with the pinpoint accuracy of a senbon, and she stopped, closed her mouth, and opened it again with a renewed sense of horror. "Tahei-san, apologies if I am mistaken, but from what you are suggesting, am I to understand that when your clansmen lose control of their kekkei genkai they are - ?"

"Killed, yes." Tahei picked up his cup and swilled its contents in a slow circular motion. "It is a terrible shame when one of our clansmen succumbs to its effects. A most terrible shame. 'Lost on the Hunt', we call it, and the longer they're gone, the more lost they are. The Elders used to tell us that the longer the Lost one is allowed to live the more likely their soul becomes so lost that it never even finds its way to the afterlife. After the release of death it will wander the Mountain instead, lost on the Hunt forever.

"All superstitious nonsense, of course! The Lost ones are a danger to the rest of us and killing them before they get out of hand is the most sensible course of action, but, perhaps you can now see, Hokage-sama, why we have issue with you keeping your boy alive. Lost ones are damned, and grow more damned with every passing day, and like a creeping cancer their damnation spreads. Killing that boy you have locked up in his cage would be a gesture, much better appreciated by my clansmen, than any sum of money you have to offer."

Tahei glanced sharply down at the two Elders, said something rapid in the Mountain dialect, and Tetsu and Hatsu nodded quickly in earnest agreement.

Tsunade watched the Elders bob their heads, nodding like puppets to the bounce of Tahei's puppet-master hands. Team Guy had suggested in their report that the Elders were being held down under Tahei and his brothers' thumbs, and it seemed as though Team Guy had been right.

"Well, we do things a little differently in Konoha," Tsunade said at last, "and in these circumstances, Tahei-san, it would be better for your clan if Uchiha Sasuke lives. Currently living inside that boy's head is the very man who made the Curse Seal that mimics the Koujin kekkei genkai, and if you have any interest at all in finding out just what exactly that man knows about your kekkei genkai, then you would hope, as I do, that Sasuke lives and recovers through this."

Tahei held up his hand. "I'm not sure I heard you correctly – the man who made this false version of our kekkei genkai is inside the boy's head? This…Orochimaru…that we spoke of earlier?"

"You heard me correctly, and, yes, we do mean Orochimaru, and if we can get Sasuke to recover we hope to extract Orochimaru from him."

Tahei muttered something that sounded both astonished and frustrated out of the corner of his mouth and the Elders whispered furiously back. Tsunade hoped that they were encouraging Tahei not to demand Sasuke be killed in honour of clan tradition.

When the discussion finished, Tahei rolled his eyes and pasted on a bright, white smile. "The Elders say that the boy's circumstances are sufficiently different from our usual Lost ones that he might have a chance of recovering. The Elders therefore allow you to let him live."

_Do you mean the Elders or do you mean yourself?_ Tsunade thought, as Tahei's imperious tone grated on her ears. "Tell them, thank you. In which case, we can return to the subject of your missing clansman. As I said earlier, we are willing to provide ninjas to aid your search for Juugo."

"We don't need your ninjas, Hokage-sama. We are perfectly capable of carrying out our search by ourselves," said Tahei, "But if it is possible, we would like to have permission to use Konoha as a base for operations, and for free travel within the Land of Fire and its surrounding smaller nations in our search."

That wouldn't be too difficult for Tsunade to arrange. If the kekkei genkai had been extensively studied enough to make an artificial version of it, their missing clansman had probably been captured by Orochimaru and imprisoned somewhere, and there would be a plenty of people – families who had also lost members to Orochimaru's experiments - sympathetic to their cause.

She said as much and Tahei translated for the Elders, and the Elders looked animated for the first time during the whole unbearable half an hour they had been in the room.

"We may need to summon more of our clansmen from the Mountain to help us in our search." Tahei put his hands together again in that prayer-like gesture Tsunade now recognised as a habit of the young man's whenever he wanted something achieved. "Would that be an issue?"

Shizune cleared her throat and coughed pointedly into her fist. She clearly didn't think that was a good idea at all, and Tsunade was inclined to agree. She didn't want any more Koujins within the Konoha walls if she could help it, but the sooner they got what they came for, the sooner they would leave.

As though he had read her mind, Tahei added, "We don't want to be any more of a burden to Konoha than necessary. The additional men we summon will camp outside the walls. They will quite easily be able to provide for themselves."

Tsunade pondered on her options and the Hokage tower creaked against the wind blowing in from the Land of Snow. "If that is the case, then it shouldn't be an issue."

Tahei and the Koujin Elders left the room not long later, to return to their clansmen who were setting up camp in the Nara forests, and Tsunade and Shizune were able to breathe easy again.

Shizune was collecting up the cold cups of tea when Tsunade said: "A tail."

"I don't think any of them had tails, Hokage-sama." Shizune paused, before noting, "although those two Elders _did_ remind me of those little monkeys we have in the sanctuary - "

"We need a tail on Tahei, and tails on all the Koujin search parties when they're sent out. Shizune, could you send out a message for me? I need to have a word with Danzo."

* * *

The five days Sasuke spent in the domed room went by in a slow slip of clouds, grey and heavy over the window above him. It was dull, but, since having his eyes carved out would no doubt have been much more stimulating, dull suited him fine.

Nobody had convinced him yet that he wasn't a prisoner in an incredibly complicated genjutsu. All of the 'characters' that had appeared in it insisted that he had time-travelled, but why would they want him to think that? What was the point in pushing such a far-fetched story? And why create a 'time-travel' genjutsu in the first place? There were far simpler genjutsu worlds they could have created that Sasuke would have found much easier to believe.

Piecing together what was going on in this supposed future was difficult. He didn't want to ask them outright. Partially it was because he didn't want to be reminded of the restrictions they were caging him in (hadn't Sai said he had been ordered not to answer Sasuke's most urgent questions), but more importantly, it simply felt _too accepting_ of his situation, and Sasuke wasn't going to give in to it just yet.

So he listened for anything the others let slip when they visited him. What he heard didn't sound especially encouraging. It sounded as though a team that Naruto and Sakura were familiar with (they didn't give any names), had recently guided a large diplomatic delegation to Konoha, and brought back a thick cloud of worry and suspicion with it.

Naruto and Sakura came visit him every day. Sometimes they came together. More often they came on their own, bringing him food, which he had been initially suspicious about because they insisted on bringing soldier pills, the kind used for nutrition on missions, but then Naruto had gleefully pointed out just how happy Sasuke would probably be if they were to bring him a chamber-pot and Sasuke had pressed the subject no further.

To be honest, there was something about both Naruto and Sakura that disconcerted Sasuke. As he picked at the soldier pills and tossed around questions to see if he could coax anything, _anything,_ out of them, sometimes he would look up and catch them watching him with a strange faraway look, like they were scared he might vanish if they looked away.

A lot of things had clearly happened in three years. That wasn't anything unusual. In shinobi terms, three years was a long time. Still, thinking about just what might have happened was driving Sasuke, if not round the bend, then very close to the beginnings of a slippery-looking curve.

"Oi, Naruto," he demanded, on the second day, "answer this one question, about the Chuunin Exams."

Naruto stopped chattering about some D-rank he had done earlier that day to make pocket money that he had then spent entirely on cans of shiruko later, and looked, momentarily, inexplicably stricken.

Then he snapped his fingers and smirked.

"Oooh! I get it." Naruto lowered his voice to a level that was probably supposed to be conspiratorial, and waggled his eyebrows. "You're trying to find out what's on the exams, aren't you?"

"What? No!"

"Aaaw, come on. It's alright. Cheating isn't all that bad, and if you really want to take some advice from Naruto-niisan – " Sasuke closed his eyes and reminded himself that, despite Naruto being sixteen, his mental age had probably only just caught up with thirteen year old Sasuke's. "- cheat. Cheat and feel no shame! Oh, and watch out for snakes. I'll give you no more hints than that, no more, but, who'd have thought it, eh?"

"Thought what?"

"Well, if you're asking about things on the exams, doesn't that mean that little Sasuke's feeling a bit…you know… _insecure_?"

Sasuke threw a soldier pill at him and although was bemused that sixteen year old Naruto dodged the first, got some satisfaction when the second one hit him square between the eyes . "As if I'd need any hints from _you_ to pass."

But, in a roundabout way Sasuke had got the answer he had been looking for.

By Naruto's reaction, at least in this version of the future Team Seven had participated in the Chuunin Exams, and Sasuke had been with them when they had done so, which meant that if Sasuke really _had_ slipped three years into the future, he also got back to his own time, before the Exams, unharmed and not noticeably traumatised by his experience to stop him from taking part.

That meant (cheerful thought of the day) that there was a way to get back to the past.

At least, there was, if he accepted that he really was three years in the future, and if there was only one time stream, and this wasn't some mad tatami universe with countless threads of time warping and wefting across each other.

Damn, you knew you were in trouble when time-travelling was actually looking like an option you hoped might be true.

In any case, between visits from Naruto, Sakura, Kakashi, and once, a silently smiley visit that lasted about three minutes but upped Sasuke's irritation level about three times, from Sai, Sasuke stretched, did chakra exercises, shadow-boxed, recited everything he could remember about jutsus over and over again in his head until he was sure that if he died (obviously at some point after he had killed Itachi) and somebody cut his head open they would find the words etched inside his brain.

Every now and again he stumbled across a 'memory blank', and felt the same sharp shock as had he miscalculated a tree-jump, the moment when a foot, expecting the firm foothold of a branch, stepped out into empty air.

Some blanks were oddly specific, like bunshin and henge, where the general theoretical understanding of what they were had stayed, but the practical aspect and the confidence of experience, had been all but cut away and attempting to push his hands through the seals for them left him fumbling and furious.

Naruto seemed to find it hilarious. Sasuke patched up his wounded pride with the small consolation that at least his Goukakyuu-no-Jutsu could still be used to blow Naruto up.

Sometimes he was struck by an unnerving certainty that there was something _wrong _with his memories in general, like he _wasn't looking at them right way, _but beyond that simplistic expression he really was at a loss.

Not that he was ever going to let anybody know what he was thinking, no matter how concerned future Team Seven said they were for his post-time-travelling mental well-being. Sasuke had a reputation to uphold. An Uchiha never felt vulnerable, an Uchiha never panicked, and an Uchiha most certainly would never be found lying back on a sofa ready to 'talk about their feelings' goddammit.

He opened his eyes, one by one, found himself looking up at the dark green canvas ceiling of a tent with a heavy blanket pulled up to his chin and a torch just within hands reach.

When he thought he heard the clinking rush of glass beads in a steel drum, Sasuke froze and stilled his breathing.

He focused on the sounds, strained his ears, then relaxed a moment later.

It was just the wind, in the trees, and although it was cold he could smell pine and hear creaking branches. There was no sky filled with fragmented colours, nor icy lake with white snakes and pale faces rushing by beneath him.

Then again, he wasn't in that domed room in the sanctuary any more either.

_Was it too much to hope for that this, whatever this was, was over?_

He sat up straight, just as sixteen year old Naruto stuck his head through the canvas flap of the tent entrance.

Sasuke sighed and hung his head.

"You know, with all the stuff we're doing for you, bastard, you could at least try to sound pleased to see me," Naruto grumbled good-humouredly, and he sat down cross-legged at the tent entrance, frost crunching under knees. "What's up with you?"

"I'm still 'in the future', aren't I?"

_And what the heck do you mean by 'stuff you're doing for me'? _

"What? Oh, yeah, yep, you are. Nothing's changed, but, do not despair! The great and awesome Uzumaki Naruto is here, bringing good news to all mankind!" Naruto spread his arms about him, and when Sasuke didn't look in the least impressed, he said, more helpfully, "We've relocated."

"So I gathered. Where?"

"Experimental Jutsu Testing Field B. We've got the whole field to ourselves! Guess those jutsu researchers just have to go to test their jutsu bombs someplace else."

Sasuke suppressed a shiver. There was a soft but heavy chill in the air, a tell-tale sign of evening drawing closer. The light he could see beyond Naruto's shoulders was dimming.

"How long have I been out?"

Naruto's breath drifted out of his mouth and nostrils in pale wispy clouds. "Six hours. I wish Kakashi-sensei would hurry up with those takeaways. I'm starving!"

Naruto rubbed his stomach as though he were comforting a small child.

Naruto, Sakura and Kakashi had arrived together at Sasuke's domed room a little before noon with a kind of forced casualness that exploded more warning flares than had they actually looked worried.

Sasuke's suspicions were quickly confirmed.

Sakura squatted down beside him and offered him a glass of water with the white misty remnants of a dissolved pill swirling inside it.

His response was as eloquent as expected of an Uchiha: "Hah. No."

"Sasuke-kun – "

"Ah, the good old days," Kakashi sighed, standing once again, Sasuke noticed, firmly on the other side of the red line etched in the floor. "When Sasuke was still a relatively sweet and innocent little ninja who didn't take drugs offered to him by strangers."

Sakura gasped. "Sensei!"

"But, we'll save the nostalgia-fest for later." Kakashi tapped Naruto on the shoulder. "Naruto. Drink from the glass."

"What? But I'll fall asleep as well!"

"Yes, and then you'll be demonstrating that this is a safe, soothing, sleep-easy from the hospital, and nothing for Sasuke to at all be suspicious about."

"Can't we just jab some pressure points and knock him out – poke, ouch, faint, thud – like I said?"

"And like Sakura has said, over and over again, Naruto, no."

"And nobody," Sasuke raised his voice, "is knocking me out until I know what the hell is going on."

Their explanation was loud, confused and strangely rushed. Naruto and Sakura had spoken to the Hokage about finding him somewhere to stay outside of the sanctuary and once they had finished convincing her that it was highly unlikely that he was a strange 'crazy alien bat-winged thing' from another dimension, the Hokage had given permission for Sasuke to be moved, on the condition that he was knocked out for the journey and saw nothing of the town en route.

They were clearly taking a lot of pains to prevent him from changing the future.

That made a lot of sense to Sasuke. If Sasuke had been Hokage and discovered a supposed time-traveller he would have done much the same. What Hokage wanted to see reality and the sum of all their efforts, all their right decisions, as well as the wrong ones, break down around them and collapse into some mind-warping dimension-twisting chasm of nothing? Just because one boy had hopped into the future and decided that he hadn't liked what he had seen? If Sasuke had been the Hokage, he would have even gone one step further and perhaps sealed off all his senses and put him in stasis until they worked out how to get rid of him.

Sasuke blinked. Naruto was talking to him. "What?"

"Gods, no wonder you're such a bastard. I was trying to be nice to you and you weren't even listening. I said, 'Were you having a weird dream, or something'?"

A chill slid down Sasuke's spine like a lump of ice. "I don't dream."

"You sure? I woke up and you were all twitching and shivering. I thought you were having a fit, so I sent a clone for Sakura-chan." Naruto suddenly had a torch in hand, and he switched it on, and shone it in Sasuke's face.

Sasuke yelled and covered his eyes. "What are you doing? Switch that off, you moron!"

"Just checking."

"Checking for what?"

Naruto dropped the torch and shrugged. "I don't know. A time-travelling radiation halo thing maybe? That'd be cool."

The stony silence that 'radiated' off Sasuke, and conveyed a hundred different ways in which Naruto's intelligence was inferior to that of coral, was not so much 'cool' as 'polar'.

Naruto tucked the torch back inside his cloak. He breathed into his hands and rubbed them together with a squeaking noise. "Damn, it's cold out here, but still, it's better than that sanctuary room. That place was giving me the creeps."

He glanced over his shoulder and fidgeted, teeth chattering. "Sakura-chan, what's holding her up? She only went into town to get some more supplies."

Sasuke rolled his eyes, pulled the blanket around him, and, crawling to the tent-flap, gave Naruto the hard shove out of the way that he had been wanting to give him for the past ten minutes.

Naruto flailed and toppled over with an 'oof!' as Sasuke pushed past him out of the tent. "Hey! If you wanted me to move, you could have just said so."

"Like you would have listened." Sasuke retorted, before standing and taking in their surroundings.

They had pitched the tent in the centre of an old crater, probably the result of a jutsu experiment. It had to have been a while though since the experiment had been carried out. Grass had already grown back over the earth and a small stand of black pines had taken root along the slopes.

"Oh," said Naruto quietly from behind him. "Sorry. Guess I should have thought you would've wanted to come out, what with you being stuck in the dome these past few days, and all. Hey, look! There's Sakura-chan! And…"

He trailed off and squinted at the edge of the crater, where a tall figure had joined Sakura in looking down towards the tent.

Naruto waved. "Sakura-chan! Shikamaru!"

Shikamaru raised his hand in a lazy wave. That Shikamaru was making an appearance surprised Sasuke. The more complicated the genjutsu became, the harder the genjutsu caster would find it to keep things consistent, and the easier it would be for Sasuke to find the flaws to destroy it from inside out.

His head throbbed. If only there was a way to work out if he was in a genjutsu or not apart from breaking out of it, or to confirm that this was not simply just _a_ future, but _his _future that he could have some power over.

"Hey, Shikamaru, what are you doing here?" Naruto greeted, as Shikamaru approached with Sakura.

"Taking a break from the house. It's insane there at the moment." Shikamaru stretched his arms and yawned. "Dad's agreed to let the Koujins stay in our old forest for the whole of their visit, so we've been helping them settle in, but it's just been one long string of complaints all day. We've had to be careful. From what we've heard from Team Guy, they're really not a clan we want to get on the bad side of any time soon."

Naruto shuddered. "Me and Sakura-chan saw them going to see Tsunade-bacchan earlier. There was something about the way they were looking at everybody though that felt seriously weird."

"That's because they were looking at us like cattle, Naruto." Shikamaru jammed his hands into his pockets and his expression clouded. "Like we don't even register on the same level as them. I've spent a whole day with them, Naruto. I know exactly what you mean. Anyway, all that aside, I thought I'd come and see how you guys were coping of late."

Shikamaru's gaze slid sideways to alight on Sasuke. After a minute of wary silence, he said, "Sasuke?"

Sasuke had been keeping quiet in the hope that something useful might come up in the conversation. He responded shortly, "Shikamaru."

Shikamaru's eyebrows shot up to his hairline. He turned to Sakura and Naruto, opened his mouth, but immediately closed it when Naruto shook his head.

Shikamaru returned to scrutinising Sasuke. "You seem…pretty calm. About this whole thing."

Sasuke stared blankly back at him. "I could say the same for you."

A flicker of suspicion darted across Shikamaru's face, but exactly who or what he was suspecting, Sasuke wasn't sure, although he had a funny feeling that the suspicion hadn't been directed at him.

Naruto raised his voice. "Yeah, Sasuke's actually been taking this whole time-travelling shtick surprisingly well. We keep telling him he's got to talk to us if he's feeling bad or having funny dreams, but he's clinging onto the tough-guy act like a grumpy limpet – "

"I don't dream!" Sasuke snapped before he could stop himself.

"And he's in denial, about everything," Naruto continued with much more amusement than Sasuke thought should even be decent. Shikamaru listened in silence. "I bet he's even in denial that he's here. He still thinks that this is some kind of genjutsu that somebody's dropped him into, but we can't really help him with that. That's just something he's got to figure out for himself."

Shikamaru narrowed his eyes and looked hard at Naruto. "Sakura explained to me what's going on, Naruto."

"Oh. She did?"

"A time-travelling jutsu? Are you actually serious?"

Naruto was unrolling one of the storage scrolls Sakura had brought back from the town. He nodded, but didn't meet Shikamaru's gaze. "Nobody's getting hurt, so why not?"

There was a light _pop!_ and a puff of smoke. When it cleared, Naruto was unfolding a sleeping bag.

"Well," said Shikamaru eventually, a little taken aback, "I suppose it's true that you're not doing anything harmful, and you two know Sasuke better than any of the rest of us, but if I were Sasuke – _the Sasuke we know_, not this one - and stuck like he is, and saw how much fun you're having, Naruto, I might not even bother – "

"Score! Hand-warmers!" Naruto exclaimed, after another pop and puff of smoke had revealed a large packet of cellophane wrapped sachets. "Were you saying something, Shikamaru?"

Shikamaru sighed and stood back a little. He recognised a lost cause when he saw one. "Forget it, Naruto. Well, so long as you two know what you're doing. I'd best be heading back, before my mum blows a fuse and does something troublesome for Konoha diplomacy."

"See you, Shikamaru," Sakura called after him.

Shikamaru gave Sasuke one last long grim look then made his way up the slope and out of sight.

* * *

"'Stuck like he is'?" asked Sasuke, as soon as Shikamaru was gone.

"He meant that you're stuck in a coma, Sasuke-kun," Sakura told him gently, once she had put away the storage scrolls just inside the entrance of the tent. "Not you, of course, but sixteen-year old you."

"You said I'd been infected by some kind of parasite."

"It's the parasite causing the coma," Sakura replied and Naruto coming back out of the tent gave her a thumbs-up. Sasuke wondered if Naruto had set up some kind of prank in the tent and was giving Sakura the all clear (older Naruto and Sakura seemed to get along better than the Naruto and Sakura Sasuke knew, so he wouldn't put it past them to team up against him), but Sakura didn't respond, so it didn't seem that way. "And now we're just waiting for you to wake up and come back to us. It's been touch and go for the past three weeks, but – "

"You aren't dying or anything, so," Naruto threw him a pair of gloves, which Sasuke initially thought looked too large for him, but putting them on they seemed to be a snug fit, "don't look so worried."

"I'm not worried."

"You're doing your I-refuse-to-emote-like-a-normal-person-but-I-am-currently-feeling-something-and-I-am-scared-by-my-feelings frown-stare thing. Sure you're not."

Sasuke snorted and turned up his nose. "As if an Uchiha would lose to something as weak and low as a parasite."

Naruto laughed and Sakura smiled. "Yeah, that's the kind of stuff we're counting on – you showing that parasite who's the boss."

The last of the evening light faded. Naruto scraped out a pit in the hard earth and struck flints over the tinder to start a fire. Huffing at the deep orange glow, he eventually coaxed it into a flame.

Once they were warming their hands about the little fire at the centre of a crater, and apparently waiting for an ever-reliably late Kakashi to return with the promised takeaways, Sasuke spoke first: "Did it have something to do with my brother?"

"What did, Sasuke-kun?"

"The long solo mission and the parasite." The fire crackled and spat. "But I guess you've probably been ordered not to tell me anything about it like that Sai person - "

"Oh no, Sai wasn't _ordered_ not to tell you anything. That was us. We _asked _Sai not to answer your questions," Sakura told him, over Naruto's rustling of cellophane as he wrestled with a packet of hand-warmers. "We wanted you to ask us, so that you'd talk to us. We want you to trust us, Sasuke-kun, so that we can help you."

They had a funny way of showing it, thought Sasuke, snatching the hand-warmer that Naruto had tossed towards him out of the air before it collided with his nose. He mashed it between his hands. "Then why is it that half the time Naruto seems to be making this all out to be some sort of huge joke?"

"Because the other half the time I'm being more serious than I've ever been in my life," Naruto said, and as the firelight flickered, in an instant so fleeting Sasuke half-suspected he might have imagined it, Naruto's eyes were filled with grim determined focus that seemed to burn.

Then firelight flickered again, and Naruto was grinning and fiddling with the hand-warmer again. "A guy needs to laugh, you know. It's healthy. Seriously, Sasuke, you should think about lightening up a bit. I mean, girls dig the dark and PMS stuff in their pre-teens but you hit fifteen, it's all about the smile and the charm and the nice guys – "

"Dark," Sasuke narrowed his eyes to slits, "and _what_?"

"PMS." When both Sasuke and Sakura began to exude waves of, if not killing intent, then intent to cause near-grievous harm, Naruto held up his hands in defence. "Pre-Manhood Stress, right? Kakashi-sensei told me it was when guys start getting depressed and broody about growing up and being responsible and stuff."

Sakura slapped her palm to her forehead. "This is why you're not going to get a girlfriend for another ten years, Naruto."

"What!? Why?"

"Because you listen to Kakashi-sensei!"

Sasuke watched the two bicker with a mix of feelings he would never admit to himself, but he recognised that a large part of it was relief.

Naruto might have become less obnoxious (at least, his attention span seemed to have got longer than the three minutes required for a cup noodle to cook), and Sakura more practical, and he had a vague feeling that Kakashi might have started taking them more seriously as ninjas, but, all in all, Team Seven still seemed to be as dysfunctional a bunch of idiots as ever. Not that he was including himself as an idiot.

To be honest, if they were still as dysfunctional as this, Sasuke wouldn't have been surprised to hear if he had _demanded_ a long solo mission, just to get away from all of them. How could he spend his days with idiots like these, when Itachi was out there in the wilderness somewhere?

Idiots like these - who would gladly sit out with Sasuke, in an old experimental jutsu field, on a night when the wind was blowing from the Land of Snow and chilling the tips of their ears until they were red and raw, trying to help and stick by not just one Sasuke with a problem, but apparently two.

"Hey, hey! Look!" Naruto broke the silence a moment later with an excited shout, and pointed beyond the rim of the crater. "When the moon's out, you can see the Hokage monument from here!"

Clouds drifted past and the moon shone through, and the line of faces on the wall of red rock lit up white and huge. It was with a jolt that Sasuke noticed the new face that had joined the line between his time and this one – a woman. He didn't recognise her.

"Surprised?" Naruto prompted him, shuffling round the fire and following Sasuke's line-of-sight.

Sasuke lied. "No."

"But there are five heads on the monument, Sasuke!" Naruto pointed at the woman's head. "Five, which means we've got a new Hokage. A Godaime!"

"So?"

Naruto glowered and stuck out his bottom lip. "Damn, Sasuke, you're no fun. Can't you at least act surprised when we show you cool things about the future?"

"The Sandaime was getting old," said Sasuke with deliberate harshness, if only to rob Naruto of the satisfaction of momentarily throwing him. "It doesn't take too much to imagine he's either retired or died of an age-related illness, like a stroke, or a heart attack. He smoked, didn't he?"

Sakura saw the look of pain flash across Naruto's face and his hands balled into angry fists on his knees.

To Sakura's immense relief, Naruto made no move or gesture beyond that. He simply said, "Yeah. He did. He smoked. On a pipe."

He squinted critically at the distant rock-face and added, "Wish they could carve that kind of thing onto the monument as well. Give the old man a nice stone pipe. I bet he would've liked that."

Sasuke noticed Naruto referring to the Sandaime in the past tense and didn't pursue it. It was distinctly unsettling, sitting between his teammates' future counterparts and being shown things about the town he lived in like a stranger, or a tourist, or an alien, lost in a strange new world.

Clouds covered the moon, and the monument was hidden from sight once more.

Naruto sat back and prodded at the fire with a twig. "When my head is on the monument, it's going to be smiling_, _and everybody will look up at it and say, 'Uzumaki Naruto – he was awesome and epic in every possible way'._"_

"Hah, in your dreams," Sasuke scoffed.

The stomachs of both boys chose that timely moment to growl. Naruto bit back the sharp retort with which he had been about to retaliate and instead looked hopefully up to the rim of the crater, muttering something about 'Kakashi-sensei' and 'takeaways' and 'make him starve out in a cold field and see how he likes it'.

"Speaking of dreams," Sakura looked across the fire where the two boys had called a truce as they thought about their empty stomachs, "Naruto, what was that garbled message your clone sent me? I only caught something about bad dreams before it popped."

"Sasuke was having a fit in his sleep - shaking, and twitching all over like he'd shocked himself."

Sasuke shot Naruto a dirty look, and with a bravado that felt about as convincing as a sock puppet even to himself, said, "It was probably because of the drug you used to knock me out."

"I don't think so, Sasuke-kun," Sakura replied, and Sasuke's hopes, as tentative as they were, sank away. "Kakashi-sensei mentioned that you were shivering when he was carrying you on the way here. I was carrying Naruto, and he was perfectly fine."

Naruto moaned and buried his face in his hands. "I still can't believe Sakura-chan carried me here. Like, slung over her shoulder, 'shepherdess with her pet sheep'-style. My man pride, Sasuke. Where the heck went my man pride? I weep for my man pride..."

"Oh, grow up, Naruto. Nobody ever talks about girl pride when girls get carried around by men," Sakura snapped. She cleared her throat and refocused on the topic to hand. "Sasuke-kun, if there's anything worrying you, you really do need to tell us. We're only trying to help you. Naruto and I…well, mainly me, but, we've been doing some research on the jutsu that was used to bring you here, and I can't emphasise enough just how important it is that you cooperate with us."

Stunned as though a fist had connected with his cheekbone and stars had just burst in front of his eyes, Sasuke found himself staring and demanding, "You've found out what the jutsu was?"

Sakura hesitated, then nodded, slowly, as though she wasn't sure she ought to.

"Then what was it?" Sasuke pressed her, suddenly filled with a heady rush of hope. "That means it was cast from this time, wasn't it? And not in my time. Who cast it? Why am I here? What am I supposed to do? Is there a way to reverse it - ?"

He stopped when he realised he was sounding like Naruto, and cursed himself. An Uchiha did not lose control. An Uchiha did not reveal more of his thoughts than was necessary…

"It's a jutsu that's only recently been rediscovered, and we don't really know the person who cast it," Sakura continued, after giving Sasuke time to take a deep breath and regain his composure, apparently more shaken by his own outburst than her words on their own. "It doesn't have a name. We don't understand all of the details yet, but aside from reported 'memory blanks'," as she said those two words she shot a bemused look at Naruto, who ignored her with the ease of many years of practice, "apparently you might experience some vivid dreams, and if you do, you can't - you mustn't - ignore them."

That sounded ominous. "Why?"

Sakura opened her mouth and seemed to run out of words. She looked to Naruto.

Naruto pitched in eagerly. "Sasuke, you ended up here by crossing through all these layers of space and time, right? Well, er, the dream – it _might_ be a bit of space-time you got trapped in your head. Like a bubble. A bubble of space-time…stuff."

It took a moment for Sasuke to process this. He had a feeling he might have been faster on the uptake if he had a better imagination, but Sasuke's imagination had died when he was eight, when it had filled up with streets full of dead people and the towering shape of their killer. When he had told Naruto he didn't dream, he hadn't been lying.

The wind rushed in his ears and blew up sparks from the fire

"You mean that there's a dimension -" he said slowly, trying the words for size, "- in my head?"

"Yep." Naruto looked pleased that Sasuke was so quick on the uptake. "A little baby dimension. It can go two ways. Either your brain eats it and it disappears and everybody's happy, or…something else happens that's bad, and it's something so bad, nobody's lived to even tell us what happens."

"There's a sixteen-year old me here in the future," Sasuke reasoned desperately. "That means I get back to my own time and nothing happens to me."

"Keep telling yourself that. We're talking space and time. Who the heck understands everything about space and time? Space and time probably don't understand space and time." Naruto folded his arms and finished with a sagely nod of satisfaction.

Alarm spread insidiously as poison through his system. Sasuke looked to Sakura, but she was staring fixedly at the fire and deliberating avoiding meeting his eyes.

Naruto laughed and Sasuke wanted to throttle him. "You don't believe me, do you?"

"Well, obviously not." First time-travel, now bubbles of space-time trapped in his head, expressing themselves as his dreams and apparently threatening something so unspeakably terrible to this world that it was, well, unspeakable. "This is completely ridiculous."

"What is?"

They looked up as one to see, at last, Kakashi, saunter down the last couple of metres of the slope towards them with a green plastic bag swinging in each hand.

Naruto all but launched himself at him. "Food! You're late!"

Kakashi blinked as a flash of orange and winter cloak snatched the bags from his hands and whirled away to the other side of the fire.

"Apologies I'm late," Kakashi said, once the shock of being called 'Food' had worn off and Naruto was busy sorting out the ramen takeaways. "I walked into a warp in the fabric of space and time and only just escaped being feasted upon by the crazy alien bat-winged things that lived on the other side."

Sasuke buried his head in his arms and groaned.

Kakashi glanced down at the sound then turned to Naruto and Sakura. "What have you two been doing to him?"

"Breaking him so that he tells us what's going on inside his head, Kakashi-sensei."

"Ah. I see. Well, so long as you break him gently, by all means, continue. Any luck so far?"

Naruto was passing Sakura a takeaway tub. He shook his head. "We gave him a hint that the survival of the entirety of space and time might depend on what's happening inside his head, but Sasuke's still refusing to play ball. Because he's a jerk."

Sasuke raised his head from his knees with a snarl. "If I hear the S word and the T word separated by 'and' again, in the next ten minutes, I swear on the Uchiha name, I will shove the person-who-said-it's face into that tree – " he pointed at the tree that was oh-so-conveniently the closest to Naruto "- and make them eat pine cones."

"Now, now, Sasuke, there's no need for that," Kakashi chided him.

"The S word and the T word?" Naruto repeated, looking as perplexed as monkey with a dictionary. "Oh, you mean: 'SPACE' and 'TIME' - ?"

Sasuke was inches away from seizing Naruto by the jaw when everything in front of him wavered, and flickered like a candle flame caught by the wind.

Something cracked. The sound rang loud in his ears.

And all of a sudden he couldn't move. He couldn't move even if he wanted to. He couldn't sense the shape of his body – its muscles, its joints, the definition of its bones; only feel its weight, as if he were no more than an invisible force, a kind of flesh-floater, struggling to hold up a meat suit.

He lost that struggle very quickly.

"Sasuke!"

Glass beads rushed in a steel drum and fire flew sideways in a spiralling flurry of yellow and red and shadow. He fell forwards…

* * *

…and his foot came down hard on ice.

…white ice on the surface of a black-watered lake, with a patterned sky above it and a dock made of old dark wood not too far away, and a biting chill in the air.

There was another sharp crack. Sasuke leapt back just as the thin green ice beneath his feet broke open to show black water, swirling thick and sluggish. He landed in a crouch four feet away, breathing heavily, the sound of his heartbeat rolling in his ears.

He steadied himself, breathed down his nose, and raised his head in time to see a hand, covered in dark black water – or was it really water when it was sticky as molasses and had the slickness of oil and looked as filthy as night soil? – punch sharply up through the ice and widen the crack.

The sky above Sasuke twisted. Glass beads rushed in his ears.

He straightened to his feet, his thoughts spinning as wildly as the colours above him.

"You have got to be kidding."

The words tumbled from his mouth, and as inane as those words were, it was good to hear the sound of his own voice, and, really, what else was he going to say?

What was happening? Perhaps more importantly, what had just happened? One moment he had been ready to pound Naruto's head against a pine tree, the next moment, here he was in the winter dreamscape, watching and waiting for something to smash through where the ice was thinning.

Except this wasn't just a dream, was it? This was supposedly a bubble of space-time stuff, as Naruto so put it, trapped inside his brain, unless Naruto was lying to him, but what reason would Naruto have to lie, and with such a ridiculously unbelievable lie no less?

He shook his head furiously and focused on the hand clawing at the edges of the crack in the ice. Dimension, dream-world, whatever he had fallen straight into, he could think more about that later.

He had to focus on what was in front of him. He was good at that. Focusing.

There was something breaking into his…_dimension? dream? mindscape?..._and somehow or other he was going to have to deal with it, on his own, without weapons, and with his jutsu knowledge shot through like an old slingshot target.

A second hand emerged and gripped the ice. Sasuke tensed.

Covered head to toe in slick black sludge, growling as it struggled against the current trying to suck it back into the lake, _something_ heaved itself up out of the hole and slapped down onto its belly on the ice. It gasped for breath then started to crawl away from the hole with slow, sticky movements of its hands.

Sasuke had retreated to stand on the balls of his feet around twelve feet away from it, and when it lifted its head and saw him, his blood chilled at the furious promise in its eyes.

It had come to end him_. It was here to kill him, delete him, return him to nothing.  
_

Or so he thought, until the thing dropped its head to the ice with a hollow _thunk!_ and stopped moving.

The crack in the ice closed up behind it.

* * *

**Confused still? Less confused? More confused? Keeping count? Poor Sasuke (13) is getting confused too. At least now he has a friend to get confused with. Or is it really a friend?**

**Thank you for reading, and until next time,**

**Best, Zen :D**


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